MURMANSK, June 17. /TASS/. The Clean Arctic public environmental project proposed creating an international volunteer camp to clean up the northern territories. The initiative followed the first expedition to the Spitsbergen archipelago.
The mission's 15 volunteers from Russia and Belarus have returned to Murmansk onboard the Professor Molchanov scientific expedition vessel, the project's press service reported.
"Following the expedition, Russian volunteers voiced an initiative to create an international volunteer camp to bring together volunteers from all Arctic states to clean up jointly all the industrial waste: scrap metal, fuel barrels, abandoned machinery and dilapidated infrastructure facilities. That could be a permanent site where volunteers can work together to clean up the Arctic territories. This approach will make it possible to create unified protocols for collecting, dismantling and removing scrap metal in permafrost conditions, as well as to combine efforts on the Clean Arctic platform to coordinate works and to exchange industrial waste processing technologies," the press service said.
Industrial pollution in the Arctic is not just a Russian problem. According to open scientific reviews, including reports from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, significant amounts of scrap metal, abandoned fuel barrels, and dilapidated infrastructures still remain in territories of all Arctic states - Canada, the United States, and Norway. Most of that waste has been there from the Cold War time and from the active industrial development of the North.
