Nghe An students respond to hot trend "Garbage cleaning challenge"

The spontaneous garbage dump where young students of Vinh University chose to take part in the Garbage Cleaning Challenge. Photo: NVCC

Restoring the natural beauty of the environment and raising community awareness, the #ChallengeForChange trash cleaning challenge has been a hot trend on social networks recently. Hundreds of thousands of before and after photos of young people from all over the world to Vietnam have been widely shared on social networking sites and received many positive reactions.

Not out of the above wave, young people in Nghe An also challenged themselves by a group of 5 students from the Institute of Agriculture and Resources of Vinh University to clean up trash on March 14. Notably, among these 5 members, there were 2 Laotian students studying in Nghe An.

Phan Thi Kim Thao, a 57K student in Land Management and Environmental Resources Management, who came up with the idea of ​​responding to the Trash Cleanup Challenge, said that when she saw the Trash Cleanup Challenge with the hashtag #ChallengeForChange appear online, she came up with the idea of ​​responding to the challenge with the hope that her actions could raise people's awareness of the environment.

“Because it is related to our field of study, in class, our teachers explained and understood clearly about the dangers of nylon, plastic… to the living environment. Because we understood these things more clearly, our group of 5 people decided to respond to the Trash Cleanup Challenge that is being shared a lot on social networks,” Thao said.

Image of a spontaneous residential landfill after being cleaned by students. Photo: NVCC

The location for Thao and her friends' challenge was a spontaneous garbage dump located not far from Vinh University's second campus. "This spontaneous garbage dump has been around for a long time. It is worth noting that this garbage dump is less than 100 meters from the designated garbage collection point, but many people living nearby still intentionally dump garbage indiscriminately. Every time we passed by, we felt very uncomfortable and finally the whole group agreed to choose this as the place to carry out the challenge," Thao shared.

Phothisane Tanoy, a Laotian student in Thao's class, said that when Thao told him about the idea of ​​participating in the Clean Up Challenge, he and his friends immediately agreed. The group chose the morning of March 14, when there were no classes, to carry out the challenge.

“According to the original plan, we were to arrive at 8am and clean up the dump in the morning. However, when we started working, we saw that the amount of trash was huge. We cleaned from 8am to 11am but only managed to clean up half of it. There were places where layers of trash were piled on top of each other, and the old layer had not been burned yet when a new layer was added. We had to clean up 3 or 4 layers of trash to reach the ground below,” Tanoy recounted.

According to Tanoy, because there were only 5 students and the workload was too large, they had only cleaned up half of the landfill, the other half was still intact. Tanoy, Thao and their group members planned to call on their friends to join them in cleaning up the remaining half of the landfill.

The photo responding to the Clean Up Challenge received a lot of attention on social networks from the group of students Thao and Tanoy. Photo: NVCC

After posting the results of their group's cleanup on social media, Thao, Tanoy and their friends did not expect their actions to receive great support from their classmates.

“Actually, this is the first time I have participated in a volunteer cleaning activity in Vietnam. At first, I didn’t think I could do something like this, but it turns out that when I started doing it, I was able to do it,” the Laotian student shared.

Tanoy also added that after hearing that he and his friends had returned to clean up the landfill, many Laotian students in the dormitory and classmates also wanted to join in to contribute. And these are also the signals, the positive changes in the environment that Thao, Tanoy and their friends want to convey through their actions.

Chu Thanh