Clean Vistula: Volunteers fished out a total of 480 tonnes of rubbish

A total of 480 tonnes of rubbish were fished out of rivers in the Czysta Wisła campaign, including city scooters, used tyres and electronic equipment, the campaign’s organisers said in a press release on Tuesday More than 22,000 volunteers took part in this year’s edition.

Clean Vistula is a river cleaning initiative, this year’s edition saw 22.4 thousand volunteers who collected 21.2 thousand bags of rubbish with a total weight of 480 tonnes.

‘Participants of the action cleaned mainly the river banks, but in many places cleaning actions were also organised from the water, on canoes and boats,’ – reads the communiqué. It added that a river bottom clean-up by divers was also organised. The initiative ran from late August to early October.

The organisers noted that the largest mass and quantity was made up of various types of plastic waste, i.e. bottles, polystyrene, foil, buckets, canisters and lots of other packaging. ‘Among the rubbish fished out of the Vistula were city scooters, furniture, post-renovation waste, used electrical and electronic equipment (fridges, televisions, cables). Volunteers also pulled out 1,340 used tyres and car parts from the Vistula,’ – highlighted.

A total of 1,047 km of the Vistula banks were cleaned up – as indicated by the organisers – from the sources on Barania Góra to the estuary in Gdańsk. Actions also took place in the river’s tributaries, such as the Brda, Radomka, San, Sole and Wieprz, as well as on the beaches of the Baltic Sea. ‘Residents on other rivers, e.g. the Oder River in Wrocław, also joined the action in order to solidarise with actions on the Vistula’. – It added.

It was assessed that it was not the amount of litter collected that was most important, but ‘the commitment of the participants and the desire to constantly care about the state of the river’. The aim of the action, it was pointed out, is to draw attention to the problem of environmental pollution and ‘to make all consumers aware that only we can solve this problem’.

‘In Poland, only about 30 per cent of plastic waste is recycled and reused,’ – the organisers stated. According to them, the rest lands ‘uselessly in landfills, forests, rivers or the sea’. ‘There they are not only a source of environmental poisoning, but also a waste of a valuable secondary raw material,’ – emphasised.

‘We need a well-organised deposit system that also covers plastic packaging other than bottles,’ Dominik Dobrowolski, initiator and coordinator of Clean Vistula, quoted in the release, appealed. He informed that employees of the Polish Red Cross, the WWF Blue Patrol, local government officials, but also voluntary fire brigades and volunteers from companies were involved in the implementation of the action.

The Clean Vistula action is a river cleaning initiative carried out as part of the environmental and educational campaign ‘#lessplastic’. It is organised by environmentalist Dominik Dobrowolski, the Credit Agricole bank and the EFL leasing company. This year’s campaign – as communicated by the organisers – has received the honorary patronage of the Ministry of Climate and Environment and the Mayor of Warsaw Rafał Trzaskowski.

Source: PortalMorski.pl