Around 30,000 people - residents, pupils, teachers, volunteers, public sector staff, embassy representatives and public figures - took part in the big environmental campaign "Don't leave rubbish. Leave an example!" at more than 50 locations across Skopje. They cleaned from City Park and the main square to the Vardar riverbank, the green strips along the boulevards, neighbourhood parks and schoolyards, and the municipalities ran their own actions too. The Red Cross joined with more than 100 volunteers.

Mayor Orce Gjorgjievski was in City Park with gloves and a black bin bag. "However hard the public utilities work, however much they act on the ground, however much waste they collect, there are always certain individuals whose deviant behaviour makes some areas of the city look messy," he said. Predictably, most of what was collected was cigarette butts.

The mayor also named specific offenders: people who renovate and then dump their old kitchens, beds and everything else in parks, on boulevards and around the bins. Fines of more than 80,000 euros, he said, have been issued against companies recently. New measures were announced too - the city's sanitation company is due to get almost 30 new vehicles this week, and the first of a total of 3,000 new bins arrive soon.

The campaign is not supposed to be a one-off: the plan is to hold clean-ups like this twice a month, preferably on Wednesdays, with companies joining the next rounds. The turnout sends a strong message. But no big clean-up fixes the everyday problem: some of the street-cleaning trucks are old and break down often, and bulky waste still ends up along the boulevards.

The success of an environmental campaign is not measured by how many people picked up a broom for a day, but by how much rubbish there is next time. If, two weeks from now, the same spots are full of cigarette butts and old beds again, then 30,000 people did not clean the city - they just borrowed it for a day. That is why the 80,000 euros in fines is bigger news than the number of full bags. Will there be more of them, and will they ever reach the individuals who do the dumping?