site.btaBusiness Owner Starts Cleanup Campaign

ESD 14:07:31 06-11-2021
LN1405ES.106
106 - ENVIRONMENT - ECONOMIC ZONE - CLEANUP

Business Owner Starts
Cleanup
Campaign


Rakovski, southern Bulgaria, November 6 (BTA) - The company manager in the Trakia Economic Zone (TEZ) near the southern city of Plovdiv has started a large-scale cleanup campaign mottoed Clean Bulgaria. His initiative followed a smaller-scale cleanup in which company staff collected 14 t of waste in the TEZ campus in the course of ten days.

The TEZ team backed the initiative and organized a "green day" in which employees from more companies joined. They collected huge amounts of plastic waste, building debris, containers and old car tires.

Now they are planning to clean a nearby canal which is apparently used by some as a dumping ground and holds piles of waste.

Dieter Emmert, manager at Hanon Systems, told BTA that he had the idea for the cleanup campaign while driving around the country and seeing all the waste littered around. He is aware that a cleanup is a one-off action and a lasting effect will be achieved only when people stop dumping garbage everywhere.

He says that the local authorities are also to blame because there aren't enough dumpsters or locations for waste disposal.

At this stage Emmert's company and other companies in TEZ are planning how to carry on the cleanup initiative and how more people can join in on a national level.

The local authorities in the nearby Rakovski are also involved in the project: they take care of trucking the waste from TEZ and properly disposing it.

The volunteers have already cleaned up some 1.2 sq km of TEZ land, as well as land and roads within 18 km from TEZ. They also spent two days cleaning waste from the bed of Maritsa River in Plovdiv and the city's Lauta Park.

Society must stand up against the pollution of nature. In a first step, they need to make sure waste does not end up in nature. The second step is recycling the waste, says Emmert.

He argued that Bulgaria has laws against unlawful disposal of waste and only needs to start enforcing them. LN/


//