How To Organize Team Competitions in the Lockdown? Tartu aims to become a trailblazer in the Baltics

NEW CHALLENGES AND NEW FORMATS: HOW TO ORGANIZE TEAM COMPETITIONS IN THE LOCKDOWN?

In 2020 we started to value simple things: offline shopping, hanging out with friends, morning jogging in the park. Self-isolation even challenged doing clean-ups. It is funny to collect waste together with neighbors but doing this alone is far from being entertaining.

Clean Games have been organizing gamified team competitions in waste collecting and sorting since 2014. But due to the Pandemic the 7th season of clean-ups in Saint-Petersburg was not started traditionally with the Spring Clean Games Cup. Activists and volunteers had to fight with garbage solely or with their families. Clean Games could not have left them completely alone and have developed completely new formats. Lockdown has proved to be a great time for self-education and taking up courses or webinar sessions. Here in St. Petersburg people could learn more about eco-friendly lifestyle and get new conscious behavioral patterns. Clean Challenges and their version for schools encouraged more than 1000 participants to complete ecological tasks. They were published online, and people took photos and videos of the results. They found out what Reduce, Reuse, Recycle concept stands for, tried waste sorting at home and even organized an eco-picnic!

In autumn the restrictions were eased, and more than 1500 competitive, active and tired from lockdown residents of St. Petersburg did their best to clean the city. Garbage had not disappeared during the COVID-19 Pandemic nor was it collected. So, all of the records were beaten with 20 tons of disposed and partly recycled waste.

New formats can keep us engaged or help to overcome problems that suddenly appear. But this difficult and strange year has shown that we are still waiting for festivals and offline city events. Even a clean-up turns into an entertaining experience when it can be shared with nearest and dearest. St. Petersburg is already waiting for the new Clean Games to take place!

by Anton Zaytsev| press@cleangames.ru

People were welcomed to take part in the decentralized games. They were held in several places, started not simultaneously and the players competed in groups of one or together with close people. On the first day of August about 6 tons of waste were collected on 11 territories.