BAGHDAD — Garbage clogs the banks of
Iraq’s
Tigris River in Baghdad but an army of young volunteers is cleaning it, a rare
environmental project in the war-battered country.
اضافة اعلان
With boots and gloves, they pick up soggy trash,
water bottles, aluminum cans, and muddy styrofoam boxes, part of a green
activist campaign called the Cleanup Ambassadors.
“This is the first time this area has been cleaned
since 2003,” shouts a passer-by about the years of conflict since a US-led
invasion toppled dictator
Saddam Hussein.
The war is over but Iraq faces another huge threat:
a host of interrelated environmental problems from
climate change and rampant
pollution to dust storms and water scarcity.
The 200 volunteers at work in Baghdad want to be
part of the solution, removing garbage from a stretch of one of the mighty
rivers that gave birth to the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia.
“It breaks my heart to see the banks of the
Tigris in this state,” said one 19-year-old volunteer, who gave only her first name,
Rassel, working under Baghdad’s Imams Bridge.
“We want to change this reality. I want to make my
city more beautiful.”
The task is Herculean in a country where it remains
common for people to drop their trash on the ground.
The green banks of the Tigris, popular for picnics
by families and groups of friends, are usually littered with waste, from
single-use plastic bags to the disposable tips of hookah pipes, especially
after public holidays.
Rubbish chokes wildlife
“There is a lot of plastic,
nylon bags, and corks,” said Ali, also 19 and an organizer of the cleanup
event.
The group then handed their collected waste to the
Baghdad City Council which took it away, bound for a landfill.
More often the garbage ends up directly in the
Tigris. It is one of Iraq’s two major waterways, along with the Euphrates, that
face a host of environmental pressures.
The rivers or their tributaries are dammed upstream
in
Turkey and
Iran, over-used along the way, and polluted with domestic,
industrial, and agricultural waste.
The trash that flows downriver clogs riverbanks and
wetlands and poses a threat to wildlife, both terrestrial and aquatic.
When the water
empties into the Gulf, plastic bags are often ingested by turtles and dolphins
and block the airways and stomachs of many other species, says a UN paper.
In Iraq — which has suffered four decades of
conflict and years of political and economic turmoil — separating and recycling
waste has yet to become a priority for most people.
The country also lacks proper infrastructure for
waste collection and disposal, said Azzam Alwash, head of the non-governmental
group Nature Iraq.
“There are no environmentally friendly landfills and
plastic recycling is not economically viable,” he said.
Plumes of smoke
Most garbage ends up in open
dumps where it is burned, sending plumes of acrid smoke into the air.
This happens in Iraq’s southern Mesopotamian
Marshes, one of the world’s largest inland deltas, which Saddam once had
largely drained. They were named a
UNESCO World Heritage site in 2016, both for
their biodiversity and ancient history.
Today a round-the-clock fire outside the town of
Souq Al-Shuyukh — which is the gateway to the marshes —burned thousands of
tonnes of garbage under the open sky, sending white smoke drifting many
kilometers away.
“Open burning of waste is a source of air pollution,
and the real cost is the shortening of Iraqi lives,” said Alwash. “But the
state has no money to build recycling facilities.”
Even worse is the air pollution caused by flaring
which burned off the gas that escapes during oil extraction.
This toxic cocktail has contributed to a rise in
respiratory illnesses and greenhouse gas emissions, a phenomenon the
UN’s climate experts have voiced alarm about.
Environment Minister Jassem Al-Falahi admitted in
comments to the official news agency INA that waste incineration’s “toxic gases
affect people’s lives and health”.
But so far there have been few government
initiatives to tackle Iraq’s environmental woes, and so projects like the
Tigris cleanup are leading the way for now.
Ali, the volunteer, hopes that their effort will
have a more long-term effect by helping to change attitudes.
“Some people have stopped throwing their waste on the
street,” he said, “and some have even joined us.”
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