At “EcoLur” Press Club, Dana Vergelyush, Founder of “Green-Green” NGO, presented the organization's three-year activity during the roundtable discussion on “Management of Solid Household Waste in Yerevan, Landfills Sites”.
“Green-Green” carries out regular cleanup campaigns (Saturday cleanups) every week in Yerevan and in the regions of Armenia. In total, 123 volunteer cleanup campaigns have been conducted, including several closed events with the participation of employees from various companies.
During the campaigns, more than 148 tons of garbage have been collected, of which more than 50 tons were sent for recycling.
According to Dana, more than 6,500 people have participated in the campaigns. “In the beginning, the majority of participants were migrants, but currently there is a balance in the composition: about 50 percent are locals who come to help make Yerevan and Armenia cleaner and more livable,” she said.
The cleanup locations have been varied – from urban slopes to river and lake shores. The cleanup campaigns carried out in Yerevan have included Victory Park, Cascade, Antarrayin, Khanjyan and Gevorg Emin streets, as well as the surrounding areas of Kievyan, Davtashen and Victory bridges.
Cleanups have also been conducted around Sasuntsi Davit station, the vicinity of Matenadaran, the section of the Children’s Railway, the lakeside areas of Yerevan Lake, as well as many sections of the Hrazdan Gorge.
Outside the capital, the initiative has reached Sevan, Azat Reservoir, and the shores of the Debed River in the town of Alaverdi in Lori region. They have also been to Gyumri and other places. On the organization’s website, the locations of previous campaigns have already been mapped. Currently, work is underway on developing a new web application that will make it possible to add new polluted sites and register as an organizer.
According to the organization’s founder, they are ready to provide the necessary instructions and tools.
In addition to cleanup work, the organization is engaged in environmental education. “Our goal is to involve as many people as possible in ecological activities and to form a public awareness that cleaning up garbage is not shameful. In Victory Park, our eco-center operates, where we conduct classes for different age groups. We are visited by schoolchildren and kindergarten groups, university students.
Lectures and educational sessions are conducted in Armenian, Russian, and sometimes also in English.
We teach both waste sorting and the concepts of waste reduction, as well as the ideas of a circular economy. For that purpose, we use interactive games, watch documentary films, and organize discussions and debates,” Dana Vergelyush noted.
During the roundtable, Dana also addressed the issue of spontaneously formed garbage dumps in Yerevan.
According to her, such sites mainly form in areas where there is no appropriate infrastructure.
“In the center of Yerevan – on Antarrayin and Sarmen streets near Cascade – the streets are so narrow that municipal service vehicles cannot enter, as a result of which there are no garbage bins in those places, and people have been throwing garbage down the slope for years.
Recently, we cleaned one of those areas, conducting several campaigns over the course of a month, during which more than five tons of garbage were collected.
In addition, an illegal dump also existed for a long time in the unfinished section of the Cascade,” she said.
Vergelyush noted that if an area is abandoned and not monitored, it is highly likely that garbage will accumulate there.
She also addressed private territories, where garbage also accumulates, but there are no clear mechanisms to oblige owners to carry out cleanup work.
“There are also legal complexities when the owner is outside of Armenia, and the municipality or utility services are not authorized to enter that area,” she emphasized.
May 12, 2025 at 17:33