Once this was a river. Now it s a floating landfill site.
During the wet season, rubbish is washed away from illegal dump sites along the Drina river in Bosnia & Herzegovina, and into its tributaries in Serbia and Montenegro.
The drifting waste is eventually stopped by a fragile-built floating barrier near the town of Visegrád.
Bosnian environmental activist from Višegrad Eko-Centar, Dejan Furtula has spent more than a decade assessing this ecological disaster. This pollution has a huge impact on the local biodiversity, said Furtula. Microplastics are absorbed by the same fish that we also eat. We lack operational recycling infrastructures. Once collected this garbage is simply burnt at the municipality s disposal facility and then residents are forced to breathe the gases emitted by the burning process.