Every spring, Latvians all over the country come together for a day of the Lielā Talka – the nation-wide clean-up campaign. This year, more than 100,000 volunteers (remarkable in a country of just under 1.9 million) took part in it, collecting over 50 tonnes of trash, including an unexploded aerial bomb discovered in a lake.

The tradition of Lielā Talka began in 2008, when the Baltic states launched a joint project to celebrate the 90th anniversary of their independence. In Latvia, this is now a well-organised activity where everyone grabs their trash bags, rakes, and gloves to clean up communal areas, roadsides, ditches, and privately organised cleanups for families and friends.

The goal? To reduce pollution, of course, along with protecting biodiversity, and improving public health by removing hazards from natural spaces. Similar initiatives have developed across northern Europe, like Sweden’s Håll Sverige Rent (Keep Sweden Tidy) foundation and cleanup days in Iceland.

The cleanups have adapted to the times, and now include tree and flower planting, ancient tree conservation, and cleanups on various water bodies. There are even digital cleanups, urging people to declutter their devices by deleting unnecessary data. While digital waste may seem invisible, the servers and data centres that store our online content consume a lot of energy.

The impact of these efforts is far-reaching. People have become more reluctant to litter, reducing the piles of garbage left in nature and raising the awareness of long-term sustainability.

Liene Lūsīte:

And it's worked. Our perception of how we treat nature has changed drastically over the past 20 years. I remember, as a kid in the late 1990s to early 2000s, the forests near cities, towns, even villages, were full of garbage dumps. It was normal, kind of. This was well before proper waste sorting in Latvia.

While the organic remains had long given themselves back to nature, the packaging stayed. I still sometimes remove flattened plastic bottles from very remote, deep forests, which have been left there for at least two decades. But the piles of used baby diapers and empty jars of Latvian national treasure – sour cream – have decreased immensely. I love to (not) see that.