This week, the barrier as soon as once more turned the outer fringe of an enormous floating waste dump filled with plastic bottles, rusty barrels, used tyres, family home equipment, driftwood and different rubbish picked up by the river from its tributaries.
The river fencing put in by a Bosnian hydroelectric plant, just a few kilometers upstream from its dam close to Visegrad, has turned town into an unwilling regional waste website, native environmental activists complain.
“We had a lot of rainfall and torrential floods in recent days and a huge inflow of water from (the Drina’s tributaries in) Montenegro which is now, fortunately, subsiding,” stated Dejan Furtula of the environmental group Eko Centar Visegrad
“Unfortunately, the huge inflow of garbage has not ceased,” he added.
The Drina River runs 346 kilometers from the mountains of northwestern Montenegro via Serbia and Bosnia. and a few of its tributaries are recognized for his or her emerald shade and breathtaking surroundings. A piece alongside the border between Bosnia and Serbia is in style with river rafters when it isn’t “garbage season.”
Some 10,000 cubic meters of waste are estimated to have amassed behind the Drina River trash barrier in latest days, Furtula stated. The identical quantity was pulled lately from that space of the river.
Removing the rubbish takes as much as six months, on common. It finally ends up on the municipal landfill in Visegrad, which Furtula stated “does not even have sufficient capacity to handle (the city’s) municipal waste.”
“The fires on the (municipal) landfill site are always burning,” he stated, calling the situations there “not just a huge environmental and health hazard, but also a big embarrassment for all of us.”
Decades after the devastating Nineties wars that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Balkans lag behind the remainder of Europe each economically and with regard to environmental safety.
The international locations of the area have made little progress in constructing efficient, environmentally sound trash disposal methods regardless of looking for membership within the European Union and adopting a few of the EU’s legal guidelines and laws.
Unauthorised waste dumps dot hills and valleys all through the area, whereas trash litters roads and plastic baggage dangle from the bushes.
In addition to river air pollution, many international locations within the western Balkans produce other environmental woes. One of probably the most urgent is the extraordinarily excessive stage of air air pollution affecting various cities within the area.
“People have to get up to issues like this,” Visegrad resident Rados Brekalovic said.
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