More than 300 actions carried out in more than 45 countries took place this Sunday in order to make the rivers cleaner. The operation, which is an initiative of the River Cleanup organization, was abig success“According to its organizers. Each year, eight billion kilograms of waste land in the seas and oceans, according to the founder of River Cleanup, Thomas de Grotte.
Some 80% of this pollution comes from rivers. The approach therefore consists of tackling the source of the problem by removing the waste before it ends up in the sea. The operation was held on Sunday, the day before the World Ocean Day celebrated on June 8. Due to the pandemic of the new coronavirus, this edition was slightly different from the previous ones. So, rather than gathering a large number of people on the same site, the operation resulted this year in smaller-scale actions where one or two people collected litter at the same place.
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In total, 303 actions took place in 161 rivers in 45 countries, all continents combined. From Miami to London, via Cape Town, Moscow, Shenzhen, or even Tokyo, Melbourne and Auckland, people went fishing for garbage. Belgium can boast of recording the largest number of clean-up actions with 81 initiatives in total. Volunteers rolled up their sleeves in Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, Kortrijk, Hasselt and Mechelen, among others. Last year, some 5,000 participants had disposed of nearly 60 tonnes of waste in the rivers of the flat country.
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Archive: report of the sequence “La belge history” of “7 à la Une” from 02/12/2017
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