Baghdad:
Garbage clogs the banks of Iraq’s Tigris River in Baghdad, but an army of young volunteers clears it, a rare environmental project in the war-ravaged country.
Wearing 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 up since 2003,” a passer-by shouts about the years of conflict since a US-led invasion overthrew dictator Saddam Hussein.
The war is over, but Iraq faces another formidable threat: a host of interrelated environmental problems, from climate change and rampant pollution to dust storms and water scarcity.
The 200 volunteers working in Baghdad want to be part of the solution by removing waste 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 a 19-year-old volunteer, who gave only her first name, Rassel, who worked under Imams Bridge in Baghdad.
“We want to change this reality. I want to make my city more beautiful.”
The task is huge in a country where it is still common for people to drop their garbage on the floor.
Popular for picnics by families and groups of friends, the verdant banks of the Tigris are usually littered with trash, from single-use plastic bags to the disposable ends of bongs, especially after holidays.
Waste is suffocating wildlife
“There are a lot of plastic, nylon bags and corks,” said Ali, also 19 and an organizer of the cleanup event.
The group then handed over their collected waste to Baghdad City Council, who took it to a landfill.
More often the waste ends up directly in the Tigris. It is one of Iraq’s two major waterways, along with the Euphrates, which faces a host of environmental pressures.
The rivers or their tributaries have been dammed upstream in Turkey and Iran, overused along the way and polluted with domestic, industrial and agricultural waste.
The waste flowing downstream clogs riverbanks and wetlands and poses a threat to wildlife, both on land and in the water.
When water flows into the Gulf, plastic bags are often ingested by turtles and dolphins and block the airways and stomachs of many other animal species, a UN newspaper says.
In Iraq — which has suffered four decades of conflict and years of political and economic turmoil — separating and recycling waste has not yet become a priority for most people.
The country also lacks proper waste collection and disposal infrastructure, said Azzam Alwash, head of the non-governmental group Nature Iraq.
“There are no environmentally friendly landfills and recycling plastic is not economically viable,” he said.
plumes of smoke
Most waste ends up in open landfills where it is incinerated, sending plumes of acrid smoke into the air.
This is happening in Iraq’s southern Mesopotamian swamps, one of the world’s largest inland deltas, which Saddam had once largely drained. They were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016, both for their biodiversity and for their centuries-old history.
Today, a 24-hour fire outside the town of Souq al-Shuyukh, the gateway to the swamps, burns thousands of tons of trash under the open sky, pushing white smoke many miles away.
“The open burning of waste is a source of air pollution, and the real cost is shortening Iraq’s life,” Alwash said. “But the state has no money to build recycling facilities.”
Even worse is the air pollution caused by flaring – the burning of the gas that escapes during oil extraction.
This toxic cocktail has contributed to an increase in respiratory diseases and greenhouse gas emissions, a phenomenon that has alarmed UN climate experts.
Environment Minister Jassem al-Falahi admitted in comments to the official INA news agency that the “toxic gases from waste incineration affect people’s lives and health”.
But so far there have been few government initiatives to address Iraq’s environmental problems, so projects like the Tigris clean-up are leading the way for now.
Ali, the volunteer, hopes their effort will have a more lasting effect by helping to change attitudes.
“Some people don’t throw their garbage out on the street anymore,” he said, “and some have even joined us.”
(This story was not edited by DailyExpertNews staff and was generated automatically from a syndicated feed.)