BNS - Inspired by the "Let's Do It Estonia 2008" campaign, NGOs in Romania are preparing for a campaign in which volunteers will collect illegally dumped or littered garbage across the country in May 2010.

The Romanian NGO's behind the initiative have named it "Let's Do It Romania."

The initiative's website at www.letsdoitromania.ro says the action was inspired by the Estonian undertaking in 2008.

Geomapping of illegal dumping sites all over Romania is to start soon, with the NGOs saying there are believed to be around 59 000 such sites in the country.

The idea of a nationwide garbage collecting day has also been picked up by Portugal. The campaign in Portugal is titled "Maos a obra!" ("Put Hands to Work!") and the garbage collecting day will be 20 March 2010.

The initiative's website is www.limparportugal.org

The authors of the initiative in Estonia, Rainer Nõlvak and his team, used special software based on Google Earth, positioning software for mobile phones and mobile phones with GPS to map and photograph illegal garbage dumps across all of Estonia. Having located the dumps, their initiative ended in a one-day clean-up on 3 May 2008.

Fifty thousand volunteers turned out in the country of 1.3 million to collect 10 000 tons of illegally dumped garbage.

"We are now planning the next step -- to share our experience with the international community, so that the software we created and our practice could easily be used to do the same in any other state by volunteers who wish to clean nature," Nolvak was quoted by AFP news agency as saying in 2008.