A group of volunteers is working in the central Hessian town of Marburg for a cleaner Lahn and regularly fishes rubbish and scrap from the river.
“You can only preserve nature as a recreational area if you actively pursue nature conservation,” says Noah Boonma of the “wage divers”, describing the motivation for the garbage collection campaigns.
The group has been collecting rubbish from the river since last summer.
During her dives, in addition to plastic packaging, she also repeatedly finds large objects such as bicycles and shopping carts.
"Some of what we get from the river has been there for decades," reports Student Boonma of the German Press Agency.
Among the finds is, for example, a parking meter from the D-Mark era.
The rubbish is a big problem for the river landscape.
Basically, "any introduction of waste into a body of water represents a deterioration in the properties of the water in the physical, chemical or biological sense," said the Hessian Ministry of the Environment in Wiesbaden.
“Sharp-edged objects can injure fish and other larger aquatic animals and birds, for example.
Microplastics and chemical residues can impair the vitality of worms, snails, mussels or crustaceans. "