IT gurus launch software cleanup of Estonia

This file picture shows a man walking in the little Estonian fishing village of Viinistu on the Baltic Sea coast. Skype guru Ahti Heinla and Microlink and Delfi founder Rainer Nolvak put cutting-edge IT technology and 40,000 volunteers to work Saturday to clean-up the tiny Baltic Sea state of Estonia.

Skype guru Ahti Heinla and Microlink and Delfi founder Rainer Nolvak put cutting-edge IT technology and 40,000 volunteers to work Saturday to clean-up the tiny Baltic Sea state of Estonia.

Heinla and Nolvak used special software based on Google Earth, positioning software for mobile phones and mobile phones with GPS to map and take images of illegal garbage dumps across the country.

"The aim is not just to clean the fields and forest from the enormous amount of garbage but we also wish to kind of clean the brains of those people who have left that garbage in nature," Tiina Urm, a spokeswoman for the cleanup campaign told AFP.

The innovative software also brings the massive garbage collection campaign virtually into living rooms where Estonians can follow its real-time progress, organisers said.

Dubbed "Teeme Ara 2008", the campaign covers all 45,227 square kilometers of Estonia that won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and has since developed a major IT industry.

The project aims to recycle 80 percent of the estimated 10,000 tonnes of garbage in illegal dumps. A map of the garbage dumps can be seen at: http://www.teeme2008.ee/?op=body=55 ar/mas

Š 2008 AFP

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