On the last Friday, the volunteers from Kuterevo Bear Refuge organized a “Cleaning trash action”. This project was part of the Croatian “Let’s Do It”, it is one of the fastest-expanding civic movement in the history. The movement was born in 2008 in a little country of Northern Europe, Estonia, when 50.000 people came together to get rid of 10.000 tons of illegal garbage from roadsides, forests and towns, cleaning the entire country in just 5 hours.

Before the D-Day, we went to check all the trash around Kuterevo and decided which way we can clean in one day. We were agreeing to make a circle, about 15km, and to clean each side of the road.

On the morning, the volunteers went to Kuterevo School to meet the pupils who helped us during the morning. We prepared some funny games to explain the importance of respecting the environment and the nature and also to tell them what and why this action is for. At the end of the day and with only 20 volunteers during the morning and 6 during the afternoon, we collected about 15 cubic meters of trash.

We hope that with this action, the pupils had a thought about their own way of life and they will not throw away any trash in the wild. Also, lots of people saw us doing this collect and maybe they will change their own way of life. The aim of this action was to make people thinking about the pollution in the nature next to them.

All the trash collected (plastic bags, glass bottles …) take too much time to biodegrades in the nature so we have to be more careful and conscious about our environment and this problem in particular. For example when a plastic bag is released in the nature, it is going by the wind in another place. It can travel a long way and finish his road into the sea. At the end, we have a sea full of trash but far away from the coast so nobody can see it and don’t care about it. Except when birds and fish are find full of plastic packaging inside of them and die because of that.

With this kind of action, we hope that people will slowly realize the impact of their daily actions on their environment, on animals and nature.

Jean