Estonia cleans itself with the help of Google Earth

Last Saturday tens of thousands of volunteers spent the day cleaning-up the tiny Baltic Sea state of Estonia.

That’s a part of a project that aims to recycle 80 percent of the estimated 10,000 tonnes of garbage now lieing in illegal dumps inherited after Estonia regained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

The campaign Teeme Ara 2008 has been launched by Skype guru Ahti Heinla and Microlink and Delfi founder Rainer Nolvak: they took images of illegal garbage dumps across the country, then they used a special software and they put dumps on the Internet using Google Earth as a platform. Each garbage place has its own ID-number, descriptive data and picture.

This was the first step. The second step is to clean it all up, and it’s happening now: launching a huge media campaign through the country, the project engaged three percent of Estonia’s entire population to scour fields, streets and forests on May 3rd.

“Although a massive amount of garbage will be moved in one single day, the real mission of the project is to shift the population’s mindset to a more environmentally-conscious way of thinking” said Rainer Nõlvak.

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