CESCI’s “PET Cup”

Nowadays, the garbage is produced in ever greater quantities and with increasingly dangerous contents which is becoming an increasingly serious global problem, for which humanity is simply not prepared to manage. The garbage around us often floods fields, forests, and rivers. Garbage is a big problem in the Upper Tisza region. The vast majority of the waste comes from beyond our borders, from Ukraine and Romania, where it is a common practice to place the garbage generated around houses in the floodplain, but Hungarian polluters also contribute significantly to the flood of garbage. The waste accumulated in the winter months is taken up by the river, swollen by spring meltwater and rain, and then deposited in the lower reaches in floodplain forests and on the shores of sand islands. The timing of river flooding and the intensity of the flood have also become unpredictable, and the composition of the sediment transported by the river has also changed. In fact, it contains almost everything seen on the shelves of stores and also something that is not visible to the naked eye (e.g. chemicals). Accumulated silt in many cases causes millions of forints in damage, and in some cases it also raises water quality protection problems due to its dangerous content. That is why CESCI’s working community decided to take an active part in dealing with the problem on the field.

In response to the pollution that has been experienced for a long time, people living along the Upper Tisza have initiated many individual garbage collection campaigns, and environmental NGOs regularly clean up with the involvement of volunteers. The PET Cup was created because plastic has become almost a regular occurrence on rivers. Starting from 2013, the crew of the PET Cup started the fight against the PET mountains. In the first years, boats built from bottles and the competitive collection of garbage were the main focus, but year after year the Tisza nature conservation initiative became more and more diverse and effective. At first, the area’s largest river, the Tisza, was the site of the action, but later the cleanup was also extended to the Bodrog, which is also a very polluted floodplain. The key to the success of the PET Cup is that it turns a task such as picking up trash in floodplains into a fun, inspiring, team-building activity and a memorable adventure. The initiative alone cannot prevent repeated waves of pollution, but it does identify the largest dumping sites and works to clean up the floodplain and the river.

The staff of the Central European Service for Cross-Border Initiatives tries to pay attention to the reduction of the environmental burden and the conscious handling of garbage in its daily activities. The PET Cup initiative is also a fun team-building activity, so the last days of August we took part in a separate garbage collection tour on Bodrog. The starting base was Tokaj, we had excellent tour guides in the person of Károly Gyenes and Attila Csepi. We set off with four touring canoes, and one of our colleagues took up duty on the motorized boat collecting the full garbage bags.