 Members of Green Hanoi group clean up a segment of a river in Hanoi. (Photo: VOV) |
By noon, the members of Green Hanoi have gathered beside the Nhue River in Kien Hung ward to be assigned tasks.
Group leader Nguyen Tien Huy advises all participants to be careful to avoid injury while collecting trash from the riverbed. In addition to wearing protective clothing, group members must be vaccinated against tetanus.
A work session runs from noon to 5 p.m. Working on one short segment at a time, the group tries not to leave behind even a single plastic bag. Their motto is “Wherever we’ve been, it's clean."
Their priority is polluted rivers and canals full of garbage that have been ignored for a long time. This includes "dead" rivers like To Lich and Nhue, which are full of household waste dumped by people living nearby.
Huy said that late last year he quit his office job and switched to working online so he would have time to go out with friends like Le Minh Hieu to clean up the ditches in their neighborhood.
The two men videorecorded their efforts and posted the clips on social networks. The response they got surprised them. The public loved their videos. And so Green Hanoi was born.
Huy told VOV that as soon as he saw the level of pollution in the rivers and canals around the capital city, as a young person and an environmentalist, he wanted to do something about it.
“That’s why I established the Green Hanoi group to call on young volunteers to join me in cleaning up Hanoi’s rivers and canals. By showing young volunteers wading for hours in filthy rivers and canals, I hope to make people more aware of the problem,” said Huy.
 Nguyen Tien Huy, the Green Hanoi group leader. (Photo: VOV) |
The group conducts 4 cleanup sessions per week. Each session involves 10 to 20 people and takes from a couple of hours to a whole day, depending on the level of pollution and difficulty of access of the segment being cleaned up.
“The amount of trash varies from one area to the next. If we have enough participants, we can collect 100 bags of trash weighing 20-kilogram each in one session. In another session, with 15 to 20 people, we might collect just 30 or 40 bags,” said Huy.
Since it began, Green Hanoi has attracted hundreds of young Hanoi volunteers including Le Thi Yen Nhi.
She recalled, “When I saw the group collecting rubbish on the rivers, I wanted to join the effort to protect the environment. The first time I cleaned up trash in the river, I was very scared because I had never done such work. After the first time, I had a different thought: the more scared I am, the more I need to try to overcome that fear.”
The group’s work has received a lot of public praise.
Having to stay for hours in polluted water, the young people of Green Hanoi understand as well as anyone the health risks and hidden dangers. But they keep doing it because they want to spread awareness and respect for the environment.