Tonnes of waste – including plastic bottles, used tires and fridge freezers – turned a river known for its emerald color and extraordinary nature into a floating dump.
The Drina River in Visegrad in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina was left full of rubbish after the wet weather.
Waste from poorly regulated riverside dumps has piled up behind a barrier in the river, leaving a vast carpet of pollution that stretches across the width of the water.
Image: Part of a refrigerator floating in the debris
Rusty barrels, household appliances, wood and other debris lifted by the river from its tributaries are trapped by a fence installed by a Bosnian hydroelectric plant a few kilometers upstream from its dam.
Environmental activists say the resulting gridlock has turned the city into an unofficial regional landfill.
Heavy rain and unusually warm weather over the past week have caused many rivers and streams to overflow in Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro, flooding surrounding areas and forcing dozens of people from their homes.
Image: This is what the Drina River looked like in the past
“Massive Garbage Stream”
Temperatures dropped in many areas on Friday as rain turned to snow.
This is not the first time the area has been littered with garbage, with the same situation occurring in 2021, endangering the local ecosystem and people’s health.
Dejan Furtula of the environmental group Eko Centar Visegrad said: “In recent days we have had a lot of rain and flash floods and a huge inflow of water from [the Drina’s tributaries in] Montenegro, which is now, fortunately, dying down.
“Unfortunately, the huge flow of garbage has not stopped.
Image: Debris is caught by the river fence
The Drina River – which has a rich green color due to its limestone terrain and often enjoys rafters – runs 346 km (215 miles) from the mountains of northwestern Montenegro through Serbia and Bosnia.
About 10,000 cubic meters (more than 353,000 cubic feet) of waste is estimated to have collected behind the barrier in recent days. The same amount has been withdrawn in recent years from this area of the river.
Dangerous to health
The waste can take up to six months to remove and will end up as a landfill.
Mr. Furtula said the local landfill “doesn’t even have enough processing capacity [the city’s] waste. Landfill fires are always burning.”
He called the conditions there “not only a huge environmental and health hazard, but a great shame for all of us.”
Image: Aerial view of the river
Three and a half years of brutal warfare in the 1990s, which left 100,000 dead, left the Balkans behind Europe both economically and environmentally.
Despite striving for membership of the European Union and adopting some of the EU’s laws and regulations, countries in the region have made little progress in building efficient, environmentally friendly waste disposal systems.
In addition to river pollution, many countries in the Western Balkans face extremely high levels of air pollution, with some cities among the most polluted on the planet.
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