Thousands of muddy plastic bottles, chunks of Styrofoam and other waterlogged pieces of rubbish were piled onto a flatbed trailer as volunteers participated in a 10-day competition to scour Hungary's second-largest river for trash that has flowed downstream.
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 travelling farther downstream to the seas and oceans.
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.
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. While the quantity of solid waste pollution has been significantly improved on the Tisza in the decade since the Plastic Cup began, the concentration of microplastics remains high, according to a 2021 study by the University of Szeged, a southern Hungarian city straddling the Tisza.
Yet as long as single-use plastics production remains high, such pollution is certain to persist. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the world produces 430 million metric tons of plastics each year, a figure that is set to triple by 2060 at current trajectories.
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