40 thousand volunteers help pick up trash on World Cleanup Day

Around 40 thousand people in the Netherlands volunteered to pick up litter on the World Cleanup Day this Saturday. On this day, clean-up campaigns are held in 181 countries by the Plastic Soup Foundation, an organization that works to reduce plastic litter. More than 1,400 initiatives were organized in the Netherlands on Saturday for the event.

Plastic Soup Foundation organized a cleaning campaign in the Amsterdam canals where volunteers will pick up trash while traveling on sups, a kind of surfboard Radio DJ and ambassador of the Plastic Soup Foundation Sander Hoogendoorn will travel in a boat together with volunteers from the Westerdok through the Prinsengracht and Brouwersgracht.

The organization asked all volunteers to register the waste they found in an app called Litterati. The data is meant to provide more information on how much waste was collected and from which brand it stemmed.

Plastic Soup Foundation will then enter talks with the producers of the waste types that were most commonly found.

Campaigns will be held all throughout the country today by different kinds of organizations, municipalities and institutions. The municipality of The Hauge, for example, has organized a clean-up campaign calling all residents to clean up litter.

In Limburg, waste will be collected along the banks of the Maas. The waterboards already kicked off a campaign during the run-up to World Cleanup Day to remove waster from the waters.