By Balqis Jazimah Zahari
Photo: Fb Sandrea Ng
BATU GAJAH: Participants walked while collecting garbage for 5 kilometres (km) in conjunction with the ‘Environmental Health Sustainability Campaign’ organised by the Batu Gajah District Council (MDBG) here recently.
Chairman of the Perak State Housing and Local Government Committee, Sandrea Ng Shy Ching said the activity with the local community aimed to clean the environment and raise awareness among the public.
“We all want a clean community environment, so we need to act to foster clean practices and be ready to take action to bring about change.
“Through this plogging programme with the local community, participants collect trash along a 5 km route for the purpose of cleaning the environment and raising awareness among the public,” she said while inaugurating the campaign.
Sandrea said the champion of this plogging competition managed to collect trash with a total weight of 30 kilograms (kg).
Plogging is a combination of jogging with picking up litter, merging the Swedish verbs plocka upp (pick up) and jogga (jog) to make the new Swedish verb plogga, from which the word plogging derives
“Hopefully this programme will remind us all how important it is to not litter everywhere and to be a responsible citizen and have civic awareness,” she said
Through her speech, Sandrea also shared that the state government will provide an allocation of RM3 million to enable the Local Authorities (PBT) to carry out garbage collection services for a total of 177 traditional villages located outside the PBT operations.
“The state government is also drawing up the State of Perak’s Solid Waste Management Action Plan to deal with this issue more comprehensively while making use of new technology.
“Hopefully all these efforts will be responded to by the community so that together we can make the State of Perak always clean, happy and green. Thank you to MDBG and all government agencies and private parties involved in making this meaningful program a success,” she said.
