It all began in the small northern European country of Estonia, in 2008, fifty-thousand people united to clean up the entire country in just five hours. On that day, a global bottom-up civic movement was born and spread like wildfire around the globe. This captured the imaginations of people worldwide, who were inspired to follow suit with the same ambitious ‘one country, one-day’ formula. Last year’s World Cleanup Day crosses borders and defies religious and cultural differences and is now one of the biggest civic movements of our time which united more than 11 million people across 166 countries the previous year.
To mark this day, Clean Coonoor held a cleanup along the 5 km badly trashed up stretch of the Bandishola – Halakkarai Road. The event involved the active participation of Citizen volunteers, and personnel from the Forest Department and the concerned Local Bodies.
A little more than a tonne of trash was removed during the exercise, and that which is still left will be dealt with soon
To prevent future dumping along this vulnerable stretch, and as a first measure in rural expansion in solid waste management, two Rural Dry-Waste Collection Centres, one at Bellattimattam and another at Halakkarai by the Sub Collector of Coonoor. The Panchayat Union-Coonoor has put at our disposal two of its buildings for the purpose of sorting and storage of dry waste which will be later disposed as per Pollution Control norms. The centres will be manned by personal appointed by Clean Coonoor, and will take in dry-waste from the nearby villages, gated communities and individual homesteads.
We sincerely hope to extend this Public-Private Partnership to other rural settings around Coonoor in a stepwise manner.