The Drina River near Višegrad in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina has been littered with an impressive amount of waste since mid-January, reports Sky News.

The heavy rains and the exceptionally hot weather of the past few days have indeed caused the Drina and several of its tributaries to overflow, which have thus come to carry the waste from the wild dumping sites along the banks.

In total, nearly 10,000 m3 of waste, plastic bottles, used tires, rusty barrels or even household appliances, have accumulated in the river and are now trapped in the barriers installed by a Bosnian hydroelectric power station. located a few kilometers upstream from the depot.

This is as much as the amount of waste that has been removed from this area of ​​the river in recent years.


Poluare extremă în Bosnia.

Râul Drina, gunoaie sufocat https://t.co/bgIFDg5SvG pic.twitter.com/mtsSjKs3Fu

— StirileTVR (@StirileTVR) January 21, 2023

Access to this content has been blocked to respect your choice of consent

By clicking on "

I ACCEPT

", you accept the deposit of cookies by external services and will thus have access to the content of our partners

I ACCEPT

And to better remunerate 20 Minutes, do not hesitate to accept all cookies, even for one day only, via our "I accept for today" button in the banner below.

More information on the Cookie Management Policy page.



Six months to evacuate

At the same time, the floods forced the authorities to evacuate dozens of people.

Since then, the rain has turned to snow, which gives hope that the influx of garbage to the barrier has slowed down.

According to initial estimates, it could take at least six months to remove all the waste that has accumulated.

However, Dejan Furtula, an activist from the environmental group Eko Centar Višegrad, pointed out that the local landfill "does not even have enough capacity to handle municipal waste" in Višegrad.

A polluted and lagging region

This is not the first time that such a situation has occurred in this 346 km river which crosses Montenegro, Serbia and Bosnia.

Pollution has already taken place in 2018 and 2021, which had endangered the ecosystem and the health of local residents.



Since the Balkan wars, this region has not yet caught up with other European countries in terms of environmental policy and waste management.

Many countries in the zone are also subject to high levels of air pollution.

Did you see ?

Fascinating images of a dried-up river coming back to life in Australia

Planet

Puy-de-Dôme: A river polluted with hydrocarbons over a length of 1.5 kilometers

  • Planet

  • Balkans

  • Pollution

  • Waste

  • Serbia

  • Video