Plan: Clean up a country. In one day. Sounds crazy? Watch this video:
10,000 tonnes of garbage was collected in one day. Wow!
“Let’s Do It” campaign was born in Estonia from one idea – what if we clean up the whole country? Here is a step-by-step guide to how Estonia managed to accomplish this amazing feat.
- Team building
- Needed 40,000 volunteers
- Grassroots campaign launched with 20 volunteers which soon grew to 600 people coordinating everything (apparently, only 7 people were working part-time on this for 6 months; everything else was volunteer time.)
- Engaging partners
- 500 partners, including NGO, opinion leaders, corporations, media, IT people, politicians, even the President of the country
- Mapping the garbage
- Using Google Earth for a virtual garbage map
- 720 volunteers marked 10,656 trash points were located on the map
- Communication
- Actors, musicians, and cultural leaders gave their voices and talents for free
- Registration
- Team registrations on the internet
- Each team responsible for cleaning up certain trash points
On May 3, 2008 the most impossible dreams came true:
- More than 50,000 people (4% of the population) came out to clean up.
- That would be 15.3 million in US and 57 million in India
- What would have taken the government 3 years and 22.5 million Euros to accomplish
- Was done in one day with .5 million Euros
- 10,000 tonnes of trash was collected
- In 5 hours!
- Garbage was bagged and sent to local collection points
- Large trucks transported trash from collection points to processing centers
One of the organizers of the campaign says at the end: I truly believe that this can also be done in your country. I wish we could plan and do something like this in India.
Estonia said: Let’s Do It! And did it.
Can we do it, India?
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Love it! As Cicero said, “If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains.”