ABOUT REYKJAVÍK
Reykjavik is located in the southwestern side of Iceland. It’s the capital and largest city in Iceland. The city’s coastline is characterized by peninsulas, coves, straits, and many small islands. It is the northernmost capital of the world and nearly two-thirds of the country’s population lives there. It’s a city with many beautiful natural landscapes.
Our local BlueCommunities partner in Reykjavik Worldwide Friends, an NGO that promotes nature protection, peace-oriented activities, friendship, and international understanding among people interested in spending time in Iceland in a useful way
LOCAL GOALS
• Beach Cleanups
• Ocean conservation
• Environmental education
UNITED NATIONS SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS
OUR LOCAL PARTNER
The WorldWide Friends (WF) is a non-governmental and non-profit environmental organization promoting nature protection, peace-oriented activities, friendship, and international understanding among people interested in spending time in Iceland in a useful way. They believe that positive and constructive interactions, such as cooperation and friendship-building projects between different nations and cultures to be one of the most fruitful means to achieve intercultural understanding and global unity. Their main activity includes organizing and coordinating workcamps with volunteers from all around the world. Besides workcamps, they also offer summer camps for teenagers, exchange programs and educational seminars and tours. As an organization, they have a rich experience with beach cleanups as they have been working on such projects in Iceland since 2006 with around 2.6 tons of litter collected by almost 5,000 volunteers.
Strandverðir Íslands
Strandverðir Íslands (roughly translated as coast guardians) has a goal to systematically clean up the Icelandic coastline by 2025. The project is established to increase beach cleanup efforts in cooperation with municipalities, companies, organizations, and individuals. The efforts of their volunteers will be focused on the project, but they also encourage locals to participate by providing them with information, encouragement, and planning. In short, marine litter will be collected and then sorted, counted and weighed according to a specific protocol, and then finally recycled into pots and crates for tree seedlings. Data collection and analysis are particularly important parts of the project as all information will be used to evaluate the actual scale of the problem of marine litter in Iceland and in the Arctic.