Thousands of people collect garbage on World Clean Up Day

Carelessly discarded beverage containers on the side of the road, empty beer bottles in the river or plastic in the forest – there is garbage everywhere. On World Clean Up Day this Friday, thousands of people in this country want to rid the environment of garbage.

The organizers are expecting more than 500,000 participants, as Holger Holland, the initiator of the action day in Germany, told the Catholic News Agency (KNA) when asked. Hundreds of groups had already registered.

The “Trash Trackers” from Braunschweig in Lower Saxony are also taking part. In the face of climate change, collecting garbage makes them feel less helpless.

Christopher Kloska, 29, founded the “Trash Tracker” association with friends during the Corona pandemic. Since 2021, the Braunschweig residents say they have collected around two and a half tons of garbage. They meet about twice a month and roam through parks and streets with grabbers and garbage bags.

There is a special event planned for World Clean Up Day on Friday – the Trash Trackers want to go out on the water in canoes and clear the Oker of garbage. Getting involved in this way for the environment has helped Kloska “to feel less powerless,” he says. The fear of the effects of climate change was omnipresent in his thoughts for a while.

Climate anxiety can have a positive impact

According to environmental psychologist Paula Blumenschein, Kloska is not alone in this fear of climate change. They are by no means irrational, unlike pathological fears such as those of spiders or elevators.

“Moreover, climate anxiety is very few people so great that it prevents them from coping with their everyday lives,” explains Blumenschein, who published a book with other authors in the spring on the psychology of climate protest and engagement. On the contrary: There is some evidence to suggest that climate anxiety actually has a positive effect on action.

Kloska describes himself as more of a lone fighter – suddenly collecting garbage together with complete strangers took some getting used to.

“We had to feel our way around at first,” he says. Instead of long speeches, they simply gave the people who responded to their call to collect rubbish a grabber and started. The concept seems to have worked: “People kept coming back. That showed me that we were doing something right,” Kloska reports.

In the meantime, a harder core has formed in the group. “The social factor and the contacts are the reason why we continue,” says Kloska, who works full-time in digital marketing. The 29-year-old experienced a great deal of self-efficacy in his commitment. “It was only after about a year that I realized that I no longer felt so helpless.”

He consumed less news and was much less concerned with global issues. “Because I was happy with my focus on local nature conservation. There is so much potential there,” says Kloska.

Half a million participants expected

Holger Holland also sees this great potential. The initiator of the German World Clean Up Day describes the day of action as a “key impulse”. Participants will experience on this day that they can make a difference and change things together. “Everyone is important, everyone can do something and it’s easy,” says Holland.

He is proud that this year, for the first time, more than half a million people in Germany are taking part. “It shows that there is a growing awareness of the issue.” This also means that the garbage problem will obviously get bigger.

World Clean Up Day has been taking place in Germany since 2018. This year it starts on Friday at 10 a.m. in New Zealand and ends after 24 hours in Hawaii. “It’s a clean-up wave around the world,” says Holland. Last year, according to the organizers, more than 19 million people in 195 countries took part.

In Germany, around 440,000 people in more than 2,000 towns and communities took part in over 9,100 clean-up operations.