The Other "Plastic Cup"

One of the worst things about plastic bottles is that they are so good at floating. Even without its cap, once wind or rain brings a plastic container to a river, that trash is almost guaranteed to get to the ocean. We have known about this problem for decades. A swirling vortex of plastic in the Pacific has been growing steadily, even after its discovery stunned the world in 1997. The Pacific Garbage Patch is in international waters, so it’s unclear who should shoulder the burden of attempting to clean it. Even if your local leaders and public works do their best to get all trash to the recycling plant or landfill, you might still find yourself dealing with whatever floats from further upstream. What’s a normal person to do, faced with a problem so much bigger than them? In Hungary, they turned it into a reason go boating.

One of many makeshift boats assembled from trash each year travels down the Tisza River. Image: the Plastic Cup.

The Tisza river is not the only river with a plastic problem. The plastic doesn’t bob steadily down the Tisza every day, it comes with the flood. Storms far upstream do most of the work, washing ton after ton of plastic into the current. It arrives in Hungary as a roiling mass: “the plastic tsunami.” But this phenomenon isn’t unique. The Ocean Cleanup are testing designs for a plastic-catching barrier on Rio Las Vacas, in Guatemala, to tackle the same phenomenon there. Barriers that catch plastic while letting fish and boats pass safely need testing. For The Ocean Cleanup’s interceptor barges, those need to autonomously sort and process a variety of plastics and other floating debris. These are serious engineering challenges, but what happens to the other rivers while those challenges are being solved? Or perhaps your river didn’t make the ‘1000 most polluting rivers’ that The Ocean Cleanup has set as their priority target?

I know a lot about despair. Depression has hounded me for twenty years. Whether it’s a person’s own mind or an overwhelming environmental issue, one thing is the same: curling up and disconnecting from the source of pain is the easiest thing to do, but it also hurts the most in the long term. The people of Hungary had the option to throw up their hands with the words ‘these things happen’ or ‘I hope we will have technology for this soon’. They could have, but instead they turned plastic’s impressive floatation against it.

Every spring, people gather on the Tisza river for a boat race. Not your traditional regatta—the racers compete to collect the most trash from the banks of the river. Some participants show up in normal canoes, but others get ambitious: building rafts and boats from the plastic they gather as they row downstream. At the end of the journey, the boats are broken down and the plastic recycled.

This boat even uses plastic bottles to form the supports for its netting-sunshade, and has a solar panel to boot. Image: the Plastic Cup.

Rather than staying niche, this event has gained international attention and has grown beyond the river where it started in 2013. This year, the fourth annual ‘Plastic Cup’ on Lake Tisza removed six and a half tons of waste. The Bodrog, a tributary that feeds into the Tisza, has a single day race. And new this year, there are competitions for youth and on the Maros River. Each of these events removes tons of waste, intercepting plastic before it can reach the ocean. But they also combine necessary work (removing plastic waste) with fun (mucking about in boats).

Participants sort their finds, ensuring that glass and plastic get recycled. Containers of hazardous chemicals (motor oil, paints, gasoline, etc.) are sent to proper disposal facilities. Image: the Plastic Cup.

There are people in our world—some of them decision-makers in positions of power—who say that ditching fossil fuels in the near future is “not realistic”. Others say technology will swoop in to save us—some of the people who say this one really believes it, but some of them are investment bankers justifying their continued financial support to fossil fuel extraction. Technology is going to play a vital role in tackling the climate crisis, but we need to start today, with what we’ve got.

Starting today is exactly what happened in Hungary. Not only has the Plastic Cup turned into a multi-river movement, but it also inspired a few participants to build a more permanent plastic catching boat. They could have waited for The Ocean Project to bestow upon them a flashy techno-barge, but no: they drew up a design, got busy with the welding torches, and made their own river interceptor.

Turning river cleanup into a friendly competition exemplifies that secret third thing we need to solve our climate crisis. Policy changes and technology will be vital. But the wherewithal to call for climate policy strong enough, and the vision to see all opportunities to deploy technology low and high—these depend on our ability to face difficulties with determination and spirit. “Moxie” seems the best word in English for this. For some of us, this is a flame that flickers and struggles against the gale of bad news. But that candle can always be relit. What The Plastic Cup has done on the Tisza is not just an example of moxie, it strengthens and spreads the will to do something, to make a difference.