Hungary is at the forefront of volunteerism

At the opening event of the ‘TeSzedd! Volunteer for a clean Hungary!’ action on Saturday, Sándor Fazekas said that this was a very important date in the European Year of Volunteering, because it was without precedent for more than162,000 people to apply to take part in such an event.

Within the ‘TeSzedd!’ campaign more than 162,000 volunteers at 800 locations took part in cleaning up the environment, both in Budapest and in the countryside. Participants cleaned on land and in the water: volunteer divers worked in Lake Balaton, and the waters of the Aggtelek National Park were also cleaned. Voluntarily participating waste disposal companies dumped the collected waste in legal waste collection sites.

At the opening of the event the Minister of Rural Development, Sándor Fazekas, pointed out that the message of this event is that we not only need to restore the environment today, but we must also produce less waste on an everyday basis. Mr. Fazekas said that in order to create the necessary legal conditions, the Ministry of Rural Development will present a new waste management bill to the National Assembly in the autumn.

The minister said that his parents and grandparents had passed down to him the view that Hungarians, in addition to being very inventive and hardworking, also love cleanliness. This is a heritage that we must live up to, and we must care for our environment and maintain cleanliness, he added.

Csaba Latorca, Deputy Minister of State for Civil Society and Ethnic Relations, drew attention to the fact that within the European Union, Hungary is setting a good example in volunteerism, as forty per cent of the adult population is engaged in some kind of volunteer work. This far surpasses the average for other countries in the Union, he stated.

In an interview with kormany.hu, Zoltán Illés, Minister of State for the Environment, called Saturday’s event a major achievement, because a huge number of people had come to collect refuse. He added that probably many more people were involved in the event than the number registered. The Minister of State also stressed the need to introduce a new law which may be the basis for a paradigm shift in environmental attitudes.

The Ministry of Public Administration and Justice – together with the Ministry of Rural Development and the Volunteer Centre Foundation – scheduled 21 May 2011 as a national waste collection campaign day, with Debrecen, Székesfehérvár and Pécs among its high priority rural centres. This is one of the events of the European Year of Volunteering.

Registration for participation was via the teszedd.hu website. The organisers not only encouraged visitors to participate in waste collection, but among other things their help was also requested in the identification of illegal waste dumps in Hungary. If anyone is aware of illegal waste disposal, or of waste which should be collected, it can be reported here.

The campaign followed others at European level: in recent years voluntary campaigns such as this one have been organised in several countries. for example in Poland, 150,000 took part in an event in 2009, in Portugal 100,000 people collected waste in a 2010 event, and in Slovenia in 2010 273,000 volunteers collected 20,000 tonnes of illegally dumped waste.

(kormany.hu)