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Brown Danube: How Belgrade's sewers taint Europe's famous river
By Miodrag SOVILJ
Belgrade (AFP) Sept 16, 2020

Old man and the sea: Malaysian's mission to rid beaches of glass
Kampung Penarik, Malaysia (AFP) Sept 16, 2020 - A 74-year-old Malaysian man's quest to rid the country's beaches of washed-up glass led to a collection of thousands of bottles, now displayed in a colourful seaside museum.

For the past 15 years, Tengku Mohamad Ali Mansor has made it his mission to gather bottles washed ashore on Malaysia's rugged South China Sea coast.

He has picked up around 9,000 of them, which he now displays in a traditional wooden house that he has turned into a museum.

They come in various shapes and sizes, from all over the world, stacked across shelves and on the floor -- with an igloo-shaped mound of bottles outside.

He even found messages in two of the bottles, one with a picture of a heart and some faded Chinese characters, and a second that has been torn apart and is no longer legible.

"I did this at first to keep the sea clean," he told AFP from his village of Penarik, where the wooden museum sits next to his home.

"I want to save people from being hurt by broken glass -- and to save the world from being littered with glass."

On a recent morning beach patrol, the spry grandfather of 20 said a Muslim prayer as he stooped to pick up an empty, white-capped bottle.

The ex-soldier wiped it down before slipping it into his backpack -- another one for his collection.

Tengku Ali's obsession began in 2005, when he saw children blowing up empty bottles with fireworks.

Worried the shattered glass could hurt people, he said he would pay them for any bottles they found -- and they returned with over 500.

He then began collecting bottles off beaches. Only later, as his collection grew, did he decide to open a museum.

The site attracts a regular stream of visitors who have read about it on his Facebook page.

During a coronavirus lockdown earlier this year, he kept busy glueing glass shards together to make bottle shapes in a style similar to Japanese "kintsugi", where broken pottery is repaired with lacquer mixed with powdered gold.

Tengku Ali vows to continue his quest as long as he lives.

"People think I'm crazy, but I don't care," he said.

"Allah knows what I am doing. I do this because I love this world."

Just down the road from Belgrade's historic city centre, gates open for trucks to pass to the banks of the Danube, where they dump raw sewage into Europe's venerated river.

It's not a secret operation, but rather a business nobody likes to mention in the Serbian capital -- the only one in Europe to spew all of its unfiltered wastewater into the continent's second-longest river.

A heavy odour rises as the brown stream of faeces flows into the waterway, a far cry from the colours that inspired Johann Strauss to write his famous waltz "On the Beautiful Blue Danube".

For fishermen who live off the fruits of the Danube and the Sava rivers that join in a beautiful, broad confluence around Belgrade's old fortress, this daily practice is "disastrous".

"I want to cry, and nobody cares," Dragoljub Ristic, a 59-year-old fisherman told AFP.

Around a third of Belgrade, a city of 1.6 million, has no connection to drainage systems and instead relies on the septic tanks that the trucks empty straight into the rivers.

The rest shunt their unprocessed waste into the river through around 100 sewage drains.

Roughly 190 million cubic meters of wastewater -- or 60,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools -- are poured into the rivers annually, according to estimates made by infrastructure minister Zorana Mihajlovic.

"No big city in Europe commits such a crime towards its rivers," claims Belgrade Deputy Mayor Goran Vesic, who has called for a proper wastewater treatment system.

The Danube begins in Germany and snakes through nine other countries over 2,850 kilometres (1770 miles) before draining into the Black Sea.

A group of Austrian scientists in 2019 noted a "critical" presence of E. coli bacteria in Serbia's strip of the river, which local experts say is a sign of the high levels of organic pollution.

If consumed, the bacteria can cause infections, said Igor Jezdimirovic, from the local NGO Environment Engineering.

- Riverbed build-up -

Thanks to its sheer size and power, the Danube mostly manages to "cleanse itself", said Bozo Dalmacija, a chemistry professor leading a water quality research team in Serbia.

For most of the year bacterial particles stay below 500 micrograms per millilitre, the level at which they pose a health hazard, he told AFP.

Those who spend their lives on the river say they have already seen it change, with a build up of waste shallowing out the riverbed.

While scientific studies are hard to come by, fishermen say the sewage has altered the variety of fish that end up in their nets.

Whitefish are harder to find whereas bottom feeders like catfish, which eat the waste, are more abundant.

"We have killed all our rivers, we will kill this one too," lamented Mladen Jovic, a 59-year-old fisherman.

"The Danube is a very strong and powerful river that manages (the pollution), but it can't do it forever," he added.

- Promises to purify -

Serbia is an EU candidate country which hopes to join the bloc by 2025.

Its environmental record is a major obstacle, with the country needing a five billion euro investment to build the necessary eco-friendly infrastructure.

The country has already stated it will not be able to meet the demands, proposing an 11-year transition period after it joins the bloc.

"It can't be done in five years. We are already late," Dalmacija told AFP.

In late July, President Aleksandar Vucic announced that 70 municipalities around the country will get "water purifying plants and sewage systems".

But there has been no news since, with the Ministry of Environmental Protection refusing to comment on the matter or clarify who would finance such a project.

"We can't do that with our current budget," said Dalmacija. "Maybe he (Vucic) has other information."

It wasn't the first such announcement. Belgrade's deputy mayor pledged five years ago that a sewage system for the capital would be finished by 2020 -- a deadline that has since been extended twice, to 2025 and recently to 2029.

In January, Belgrade authorities signed an agreement with the China Machinery Engineering Corporation (CMEC)to start work on a wastewater treatment plant for the city, but construction hasn't started as Serbia is yet to allocate money in the budget.

Jezdimirovic, from the environmental NGO, is waiting to see real results.

"As the old Latins used to say -- deeds, not words."


Related Links
Our Polluted World and Cleaning It Up


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