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Garbage covers the banks of Baghdad’s Tigris River, but an army of young volunteers is cleaning it up, a rare environmental endeavour in the war-torn country.
They pick up soggy rubbish, water bottles, aluminium cans, and muddy styrofoam boxes while wearing boots and gloves as part of the Cleanup Ambassadors, a green activism programme.
“This is the first time this region has been cleaned since 2003,” a passer-by exclaims, referring to the years of strife since a US-led assault deposed tyrant Saddam Hussein.
Although the conflict is finished, Iraq now faces a new threat: a slew of interconnected environmental issues ranging from climate change and chronic pollution to dust storms and water scarcity.
The 200 volunteers working in Baghdad want to contribute to the answer by cleaning up a section of one of the great rivers that gave birth to Mesopotamia’s old civilisations.
“It crushes my heart to see the Tigris banks in this condition,” said Rassel, a 19-year-old volunteer working beneath Baghdad’s Imams Bridge.
“We intend to alter this reality. I’d like to improve the aesthetics of my city.”
In a country where people still leave their rubbish on the ground, the endeavour is Herculean.
The Tigris River’s verdant banks, which are popular for picnics by families and groups of friends, are regularly covered with rubbish, ranging from single-use plastic bags to the disposable tips of hookah pipes, especially during public holidays.
Wildlife gets suffocated because of garbage.
“There’s a lot of plastic, nylon bags, and corks,” Ali, a 19-year-old cleanup organiser, said.
The group then handed over their rubbish to the Baghdad City Council, who hauled it away to be disposed of at a landfill.
The waste is frequently dumped directly into the Tigris. It is one of Iraq’s two major waterways, along with the Euphrates, that are subjected to a variety of environmental threats.
Rivers and their tributaries are dammed upstream in Turkey and Iran, overused along the way, and polluted with residential, industrial, and agricultural waste.
Trash that flows downriver clogs riverbanks and wetlands, posing a threat to both terrestrial and aquatic animals.
According to a United Nations document, as the water drains into the Gulf, plastic bags are frequently eaten by turtles and dolphins and clog the airways and stomachs of many other animals.
Separating and recycling rubbish has yet to become a priority for most people in Iraq, despite four decades of conflict and years of political and economic turmoil.
According to Azzam Alwash, the head of the non-governmental organisation Nature Iraq, the country also lacks sufficient infrastructure for waste collection and disposal.
“There are no ecologically pleasant landfills, and recycling plastic is not commercially viable,” he stated.
Smoke plumes
The majority of waste ends up in open dumps, where it is burned, sending plumes of toxic smoke into the air.
This occurs in Iraq’s southern Mesopotamian Marshes, one of the world’s largest inland deltas, which Saddam once fully drained. They were designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2016 for their biodiversity as well as their historical history.
Today, a 24-hour fire outside the village of Souq al-Shuyukh, the gateway to the marshes, burns hundreds of tonnes of waste under the open sky, sending white smoke many kilometres distant.
The open burning of rubbish pollutes the air, and the actual cost is the loss of Iraqi life “Alwash stated. “However, the state lacks the funds to construct recycling facilities.”
Worse is the air pollution generated by flaring, which is the process of burning off the gas that escapes during oil production.
This poisonous combination has contributed to an increase in respiratory ailments and greenhouse gas emissions, a scenario that has alarmed the UN’s climate scientists.
In statements to the official news agency INA, Environment Minister Jassem al-Falahi agreed that garbage incineration has a negative impact on the environment “Toxic gases have an impact on people’s life and health.
However, because there have been few official measures to address Iraq’s environmental problems thus far, projects such as the Tigris cleanup are leading the way for the time being.
Ali, the volunteer, hopes that their efforts will have a longer-term impact through influencing public opinion.
“Some individuals have stopped putting their trash on the street,” he explained, “and some have even joined us.”
