How Cleanups Can Help To Stop Pollution

Read the Story of Bendi and Andrew, two Plastic Pirates who fight plastic pollution all over Europe.

We are Bendy and Andrew,  two young Plastic Pirate ambassadors from Hungary, East Europe. We are students and volunteers. We live alongside a Danube River tributary, called the Tisza River.

Bendy as a kid, giving an interview (left picture). Andrew as a kid sitting
on a pile of plastic collected during a river cleanup (right picture).

When Andrew and I were small kids, our parents took us on some strange summer holidays. We did not go to the sea, like other families, but instead, we went to the river and activities such as the Plastic Cup. This is a funny boat race for silly people who do not build their boats out of ordinary materials like wood or glass fiber as any other person would do. No, they build their boats from plastic bottles and other kinds of waste and call themselves plastic pirates! Interesting isn't it? We grew up with this Plastic Cup. In the beginning, we thought it would always be like this: friends, boats, and lots of fun. Then, as we grew older, we started to understand, this is a bit more serious than that. 

Getting (not too) serious and making some videos

The Tisza River is polluted with a lot of plastics. A lot of plastic, in some places you cannot imagine how much. The plastic comes from places like Ukraine, where there is a war ongoing and people cannot afford to order services like garbage trucks. There is also a major plastic flow from other places like poor places in Romania. That is why we were sailing with these plastic bottle boats and cleaning the river. Then our parents asked us if we could do something different. Let’s do some environmental or educational videos - they said. And of course, we said yes. Even if we were small, we understood that plastic pollution is a great problem, and we have to do something about it. So we tried our best. Now, years later it is a bit awkward for us to watch these films again.

Doing citizen science and making even more videos

First, we did not know what citizen science was. But then we were asked to grab a smartphone, download the TRASHOUT application and go out with family and friends. The idea was to find plastic pollution along the banks of the Tisza and report these sites via the app. The project was called #petcamino (in Hungarian the plastic bottle is called the PET bottle, hence the name).  If you search for the hashtag on Facebook, you will find some content about it, here is just one video.

The TRASHOUT application can be used to report pollution sites.

The idea worked because people from all over tried to help. Volunteers from 5 countries walked both shores of the river, which means more than 2000 kilometres of the bank was marked. We found thousands (!) of polluted sites and we have put them on a plastic pirate TREASURE MAP, still used today to organize river cleanups. But if you ask us, the most important result was not the map or the data, but more the videos which helped a lot of people to find each other.

This also helped us to participate in  Plastic Pirates GO EUROPE! , because we knew how to bring in schools and kids to projects. When we did the Plastic Pirates sampling on the Bodrog river in Sárospatak, we thought that we are doing something important, something that counts. And that felt really good. We also loved being at the Plastic Pirates summit 2024 in Brussels as Plastic Pirates Ambassadors! Not only because I’m obsessed with traveling around the world, but also because of the people we met there. It was so interesting to talk to the other young Ambassadors and hear about their experiences in their countries. 

Bendy and Andrew (top left) with Plastic Pirate Ambassadors from all
over Europe at the Plastic Pirates Summit in Brussels, November 2024.

Finding other plastic pirates in Ukraine and making even more videos

We think everybody is a plastic pirate who is trying to stop plastic pollution in rivers or the sea. Some of us do citizen science, others, like Béla from Ukraine, collect waste. He found us on Facebook, because of the videos that we made. He did not have any money, so at the Plastic Cup, we made a crowdfunding campaign to help him. It collected around 10.000 USD in 3 days! From the funding Béla could buy a big truck which he has been collecting waste with ever since. Here is a film about him and his Riversaver Truck.

We also travelled to Ukraine and saw where the plastic was coming from with our own eyes. We went there with our plastic recycling workshop, called the River Litter Lab (in Hungarian: MÜMÜ).

BENDY (left photo) with school kids in Ukraine, working as an animator of the River
Litter Lab. On the right, is Andrew with kids in Bulgaria, showing how to recycle plastics.

We found so many nice people in Ukraine. Friendly people who, just like us, wanted to stop the pollution. Believe it or not, now Plastic Cup has helped to buy not only one truck but many more, minibuses, forklifts, plastic shredding machines, and baling machines. We also bought hundreds of waste bins. So as we write this, we are more successful with this than with river cleanups. Because with river cleanups we already collected about 400 tons of plastic by now. But in Ukraine, we have collected more than 1000 tons of plastic! And all this before it entered the river, or the ocean.  

More Information

Plastic Pirates and the Mission to Restore our Ocean and Waters

By applying the citizen science approach to investigate the importance of rivers as pathways to ocean pollution, the  Plastic Pirates – Go Europe!  citizen science initiative enables researchers to identify sources of and mitigation measures for plastic pollution. Through upscaling the initiative to the coverage of river systems and geographical areas across the EU, citizens will be empowered to produce data at the local level and, thereby, to contribute to closing the research gap at the European level. The Plastic Pirates will help to achieve the objectives of the  Mission Restore our Ocean and Waters , in particular its ambition to prevent and eliminate pollution in European seas and waters, and is included as specific action in its implementation plan.

source: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/5a754f546f6d4c5e95d2171709ba0b30, by Bendeguz Bachrathy and Andras D. Molnar