Almost two tonnes of waste collected in a single morning. It is the spoils of a group of sixty-five volunteers on one of the bends of the Tisza river in Serbia. A clean-up and awareness-raising operation benefitting science and the environment.
The Tisza is one of the most polluted rivers in Europe.It flows from the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine and on its descent towards the Danube, it crosses this country, Ukraine, as well as Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Serbia, carrying everything that man throws at it.
Cleaning and rubbish collection actions are planned as part of the ADAPTisa project. On this occasion the group, consisting of sixty-five people: volunteers, local representatives, university students, professors from the Faculty of Technical Sciences in Novi Sad and the European Affairs Fund of the University of Szeged, collected 1.8 tonnes of waste. They combed the banks on foot, and the riverbed in a speedboat and canoes, sorting them into categories: plastic bottles, cans, glass and hard plastic; identifying recyclables.
In addition to raising awareness, they are contributing to science, stresses Maja Petrović, associate professor at the University of Novi Sad and coordinator of this activity. “These students and the professors came here to collect the waste but actually they're trying to see how many of different kind of waste we can find along the coast and also in the Tisza river. We are trying to see if the mainly plastic waste is influencing the Tisza River and the occurrence of phthalates in the Tisza River. We will also examine if there is a pesticide and which group of pesticides because when TISZA comes out there it actually ends up at agricultural fields” she adds.
For Maja Petrović, “this waste is not just aesthetic, ecological, economic problem in every country, but the problem is much greater, because when it is on the coast, it is actually affecting the water flow. So it's very important to collect the waste, to free our shores from it, and to make rivers breathe.”