Volunteers send another team to Vilkitsky Island for Arctic cleanup

TASS, August 31. Volunteers of the Clean Arctic national project began cleaning of the uninhabited Vilkitsky Island (the Yamalo-Nenets Region). The expedition will continue to mid-September, the regional government said on Monday. In 2021, the first expedition to clean the Vilkitsky Island was in July-August. Its organizer was the Arctic Volunteers movement. The team cleaned the area of two hectares, prepared for transportation more than 100 cubic meters of remaining fuel, pressed 1,460 barrels, where every barrel’s volume was to fit 200 liters of fuel. "Yesterday (August 29), ten volunteers of the Clean Arctic project left for the Vilkitsky Island, where they will work to mid-September," the regional government said. "The team will continue the work, which the Arctic Volunteers were doing, to prepare the collected waste for transportation and processing, which are planned for 2022." The Clean Arctic’s volunteers worked on the Yamal in early August: 15 people cleaned the Kara Sea’s coastline near the Kharasavey gas field - they collected 43 cubic meters of fuel and more than 20 tonnes of scrap metal. By 2024, the Clean Arctic movement’s volunteer teams plan to clean the territory of village Cape Kamenny. The Clean Arctic project’s authors are Captain of the 50 Let Pobedy nuclear-powered Arctic class icebreaker Dmitry Lobusov and Gennady Antokhin, Captain on FESCO’s ships from 1982 to 2012. In early June, Captain Lobuzov suggested organizing a "big Arctic cleanup," hoping the joint effort would clean the Arctic territories from accumulated scrap metal and fuel. The program, presented at the Public Chamber on July 5, has been widely supported, including by the president’s ecology envoy Sergei Ivanov, the nature watchdog Rosprirodnadzor, volunteer and public organizations, scientific community and by the Arctic regions’ governors. Vilkitsky Island The industrial waste had remained in the Yamalo-Nenets Region, including on the Vilkitsky Island, since the first wave of Yamal’s intensive exploration in the 1960-1970s. Back then, ecology standards in hydrocarbon production were less strict, and the damage was only growing. Since 2017, Green Arctic’s volunteers continue the cleanup mission on the uninhibited Vilkitsky Island in the Kara Sea. The island is about nine kilometers wide and about 18 km long (or more than 40 km long together with the Vostochnaya shallow area). Read more