A private company will soon be assigned to clean rubbish from Athens’s polluted Kifissos River, Environment, Physical Planning and Public Works Minister Giorgos Souflias said yesterday, just one day after Kathimerini and Skai Radio and TV launched a volunteer campaign to clean up the river.

Souflias said his ministry was urgently seeking to begin clearing hundreds of tons of rubble and other waste that has been dumped in the river over the last few decades. Volunteers, aided by bulldozers and trucks, helped clear more than 250 tons of rubbish from a section of the Kifissos in northern Athens on Thursday.

Cleanup efforts will continue tomorrow in the Adames district, near Nea Kifissia. Volunteers should meet by 10 a.m. at Kifissia train station, from where a bus will take them to the river.