It only took a half-year for Kyivan Olena Kuleba, 33, and her friends to turn an abandoned dump in Kyiv’s center into a green zone with fruit trees, rose bushes, a playground and even a small outdoor art gallery. Now it is one of the coziest areas in town.
Kuleba’s activity is just one example of how many young Ukrainians strive to make a difference in their country, including cleaning rubbish. They’ve got lots of work ahead.
There are some 36 billion tons of garbage accumulated in various dumps in Ukraine, analysts say. It sprawls over 42 thousand square kilometers. “Every year nearly 450 tons of new garbage is produced in the country and only three percent of it is recycled, while the rest is disposed at landfills,” says Tetyana Tymochko, head of the public institution All-Ukrainian Environmental League.
Public activist Mariya Nasedkina, 29, cringed every time she saw garbage on the streets of Ukrainian cities when she returned from her trips to Europe. “One day when I was returning home after studying in Europe, I decided to act,” Nasedkina recalls. She found like-minded people and set up a non-profit public organization called Dyvovyzhni (Amazing) in 2013.
Nasedkina and her friends have since painted benches in public parks at their own expense, repaired front doors and elevators in apartment buildings in Kyiv, cleaned several parks and public gardens. “We create a better environment by making small but concrete steps,” she says.
Volodymyr Harkusha, a 32-year-old information technology developer in Kyiv, received an email from a female stranger, inviting him to join cleanup of a Kyiv park. “I came to the meeting and it was the first time when I realized the importance of changing people’s attitude towards the environment,” Harkusha recalls.
In 2009, he organized garbage pickup on the banks of the Lake Sribne in Kyiv’s Osokorky district on the left bank. The following year he founded a non-profit environmental organization “Let’s Make Ukraine Clean.”
Now Harkusha organizes nationwide cleanups. “We started in 2009 with around 40 volunteers cleaning parks in Kyiv. In 2014, we already had 170,000 volunteers cleaning more than 1,000 settlements all over Ukraine,” he says. Last year, his volunteers collected 18,000 cubic meters of garbage. “The more people join us, the more noticeable results are,” Harkusha sums up.
Hlib Antonenko, a 23-year-old environmental activist from Kyiv, is a marketing specialist.
“Late February I was walking along the Dnipro River and was shocked to see tons of garbage on the river banks,” he says. Antonenko blames municipal workers for dumping the trash there. His photo of Obolon district municipal road service workers unloading old truck tires near Lake Redkine in Kyiv’s Obolon district went viral on Facebook, angering many Kyivans. Municipal workers denied the allegations.
“It is most likely slander,” Mykola Holeha, chief engineer of the Obolon municipal road service told the Kyiv Post in response to accusations. After taking the photo, Antonenko stepped up the effort to fight the problem He plans to gather friends to do a weekend cleanup here.
Nasedkina says that mothers with small children and young people between 20 and 35 are usually the most motivated for change but older people have also joined the cause. “The EuroMaidan Revolution affected Ukrainian minds significantly. Now people have a sense that they can make changes in the country. And our goal is to sustain this burst of enthusiasm.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Nataliya Trach can be reached at [email protected]
