This Hungarian man quit his job to clean up his favourite river

Bence Pardy used to clear tables for a living. Now he picks up plastic waste from his local river.

Pardy quit his job as a waiter in Budapest to wage a battle against the trash polluting the river where he spent much of his childhood.

The Tisza is Hungary’s second largest river, flowing from Ukraine, through Hungary, joining the Danube in Serbia and then moving eastwards to the Black Sea. In three months, Pardy has filled 466 huge trash bags full of discarded plastic from the part of the river that flows near the small town of Tiszafured.

Working from a small motorboat, he collects waste by hand. There is so much of it that in many places there are floating islands made up of plastic bottles, overgrown with vegetation.

Over the summer, Pardy also joined a larger-scale clean-up mission, working with other volunteers to remove 11 tonnes of waste from the Tisza. The volunteers found everything from refrigerators to car parts, as well as hazardous items like needles.

“I was so shocked by this that I could not continue doing and enjoying my job - and now here I am,” he told Reuters.

“My sad experience is that I see anglers or the people who come for holidays and they just walk past the rubbish, and even when it is at arm’s length, they don’t pick it from the river. I am astonished to see such negligence.”

Community clean-up

Volunteer-led operations are growing in popularity as people look to tackle the impact our discarded waste is having on the environment.

In the UK this year, for example, there have been organized litter-picking days across the country, where people are encouraged and sometimes rewarded for picking up trash. In the US, The Great American Cleanup brings together more than 3 million volunteers to help collect litter and clean public spaces across the country.

The Global Plastic Action Partnership, meanwhile, brings together decision-makers from across sectors to try to fast-track the transition to a circular plastics economy, whereby plastics can be used and recycled sustainably.

But even though there is growing awareness about the issue of plastic pollution, the scale of the task at hand is immense. By 2050, the oceans are expected to contain more plastics than fish by weight, while the plastics industry is likely to consume 20% of total oil production and 15% of the annual carbon budget.