By BELA SZANDELSZKY Associated Press
Share this story

TISZAROFF, Hungary — Thousands of muddy plastic bottles, chunks of Styrofoam and other waterlogged pieces of rubbish are piled onto a flatbed trailer on the banks of the Tisza River in Hungary — a metric ton of waste that was removed by hand from the waterway and its floodplain in a single day.

It’s the haul of volunteers participating in a 10-day competition that draws over 150 people, life-jacketed rivergoers of all ages that pile into dozens of canoes to scour Hungary’s second-largest river for trash that has flowed downstream.

ADVERTISING

Since its start in 2013, participants in the annual Plastic Cup competition — which offers a prize for those who collect the most trash each year — have gathered more than 330 tons (around 727,000 pounds) of waste from the Tisza and other Hungarian waters.

Zsolt Tamas, the Plastic Cup’s competition director, says the effort aims not only to improve and preserve Hungary’s natural environment, but to interrupt a growing global ecological crisis by preventing as much waste as possible from traveling farther downstream to the seas and oceans.

“The biggest source of global waste pollution is rivers. The waste comes down the rivers, through the seas and into the ocean, where currents form it into big islands,” Tamas said, referring to collections of debris and microplastics that ocean currents gather into giant fields called gyres.

“If we can prevent this global problem on the rivers, then less will enter the oceans,” he said. “Prevention, solving it at the beginning of the pipeline is the best. If it doesn’t get into the Tisza, then we have nothing to pull out.”

Calls for addressing the global plastics crisis have become more urgent in recent years as studies conclude that exposure to such pollution can carry grave ecological and human health risks.

Carbon dioxide emissions stemming from plastic manufacturing are known to contribute to climate change, and some studies suggest that plastics, particularly when broken down into tiny pieces, can have an impact on hormones, fertility, and the endocrine, nervous and immune systems, and can carry an increased risk of cancers.

Research cited by a 2023 United Nations Environment Programme report says microplastics, tiny fragments less than five millimeters in length, have been found “in the deepest recesses of the ocean, in pristine mountain glaciers, in breast milk and human bodies.”

According to the U.N., 75% of plastic waste originates in municipal solid waste streams before being carried into the oceans, “significantly contributing to environmental degradation and biodiversity loss” such as marine and coastal wildlife becoming entangled in plastic waste, or ingesting it after mistaking it for food.

On the Tisza, volunteers disembark from their canoes and scale the steep banks of the river with yellow collection bags in hand, entering the dense vegetation and braving the thick mosquitoes, thorns and nettles as they search for waste. Some use an open-source online application as a guide, where any user can mark places they’ve discovered larger deposits of trash throughout the year.

Once their canoes are overloaded with collection bags, they offload them on waiting “mother ships” — makeshift rafts floating on pontoons of baled plastic bottles — where team members collect the bags and begin sorting through the trash.

The volunteers, who camp in a new spot each night as they make their way downriver, collect an average of 70 tons (around 154,000 pounds) of waste from the Tisza each year. The group estimates it has removed nearly 4 million plastic bottles from Hungarian waterways, and all recyclable materials — around 60% of what they collect — is sent to recycling facilities for processing, while the rest is transported to landfills.