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Easter cleaning has been attracting helpers in the Fulda district for 50 years. At this year's opening event, the Ottilienschule Niesig showed how committed the youngest children are to a clean environment.
Niesig – “Some people collect stamps or football pictures – we collect garbage.” With these words, the principal of the Ottilienschule Niesig, Michaela Runde, opened the opening event of the Easter cleaning in the Fulda district. For Rund, the campaign is no longer just a tradition, but an institution. Year after year, students take part with great commitment – and have done so for 50 years. Last year the kick-off event took place at the Vogelsbergschule in Hosenfeld.
50 years of Easter cleaning: Environmental campaign inspires helpers in Fulda
This time too, the children were fully committed: they combed the school grounds and adjacent paths for rubbish for around an hour and a half. The result was impressive: around ten filled garbage bags were piled up at the end of their tour. “Quite a lot,” said circulation happily – especially given the short collection time.
“We picked things out of rivers and walked quite a bit,” one student reported proudly. “We also passed a cigarette stand where there were probably thousands of cigarette butts.” In addition to countless small parts, the children found curiosities: including a rubber duck, a rusty spray can and even an empty beer barrel.
Bernd Woide (CDU), district administrator and chairman of the district association for the German Forest Protection Association (SDW), addressed the students at the opening event with his words: “If the adults were as exemplary as you, there wouldn’t be so much rubbish lying around.”
Easter cleaning 2026
The office at the Fulda Forestry Office (Gerloser Weg 4 in Fulda) has been distributing green SDW garbage bags with smaller, unlabeled garbage bags and protective gloves to schools, clubs and other participating groups since Monday, March 2nd. The main action days are Friday, March 20th and Saturday, March 21st.
The mayor of Niesig, Holger Kilian (CDU), emphasized the importance of the campaign as a tradition in the Fulda district and recalled that the problem of discarded waste exists all year round. “It's nice that we have the Easter cleaning campaign. Unfortunately, Easter only comes once a year,” he says.
The students also sang a garbage song (“Garbage, garbage, garbage – we are the cleaners”) and performed a “broom dance” in which they swung their brooms to the beat of the drums. The colorful supporting program made it clear that the children had dealt intensively with the topic in advance.
Elementary school students receive a cherry tree as a gift
As a thank you for their commitment and as a reminder of Easter cleaning, the SDW district association gave the Ottilienschule a sweet cherry tree, which will be looked after by the first class and whose cherries will be harvested by future school children. The district association also thanked the company KCL GmbH in Eichenzell, the Sparkasse Fulda and the Fulda district for their support.
In 1976, the first Easter cleaning campaign was carried out by the then head of the Fulda-Nord forestry department, Dr. Henning Faust, managing director of the SDW district association. The goal: to spring clean the district's landscape every year. Since then, 185,000 people have collected more than 15,000 cubic meters of garbage to date. In 2025, around 5,000 helpers from schools, fire departments and clubs worked around 20,000 hours on Easter cleaning. This year the focus is on ditches and forest edges.
The numbers illustrate the relevance of the annual Easter cleaning. But in the long term, those involved in the opening event agreed that rubbish should not be thrown away carelessly. Headmaster Michaela Rund summed it up: “The best rubbish is the one that doesn’t end up in nature, but in the rubbish bin.”
