Volunteers remove over 6 tonnes of waste from River Tisza

Some 6.1 tonnes of waste has been removed from a 70km stretch of the River Tisza near Szolnok, in central Hungary, by environmental volunteers working over the past several days, the organisers of the 11th Tisza PET Cup competition said on Tuesday.

Thanks to waste collection at the catchment areas and the upper Tisza region in recent years, as well as the dam in Kisköre, less waste was found in the wooded areas along the river, the statement said. The 11th Tisza PET Cup was won by a team of Siemens Energy who collected 254 bags of waste out of the total 937 bags accumulated during the competition, it added.

The ministry of energy affairs was the main sponsor of the competition this year. Thanks to the series of PET Cup competitions, several hundreds of thousands of kilos of waste have been removed from Hungarian rivers in the past decade, more than twice as much as by the Ocean CleanUp scheme renowned for similar efforts targeting oceans, the statement said.

Of the 328,000 kgs of waste collected by the environmental volunteers over the years in Hungary, some 60 percent has been recycled, it added.

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