Polluted rivers are an interstate problem, but also a matter of individual conscience

The recently adopted Water Management Plan on the territory of Serbia until 2027 established a program of measures to ensure clean rivers and lakes and unpolluted groundwater. It is necessary to remove landfills by the rivers and build waste water purifiers and improve monitoring. The document is aligned with the principles of the European Water Framework Directive, whose goal is to achieve good water quality in all European countries, which requires international cooperation.

When the “Potpeć” hydropower plant was built, there was almost no waste in Lima. At the beginning of this year, 15,000 cubic meters of waste were removed from Lake Potpeć. There is not much of it at the moment, however, new ones will accumulate very soon, if the residents who live in the settlements next to Lim continue to behave as before and to throw waste wherever they go.

In recent years, the river is sometimes not visible because of the garbage it collects from the settlements along the stream. Waste also endangers the operation of hydropower plants.

“Sometimes that garbage causes the machines themselves to crash, so we are out of order, so that causes some additional costs, and damage to the EPS. On our side, with our machinery, we remove floating waste from the surface of the lake and during the work, we hire additional divers every year,” said the director of Limski HE, EPS.

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Three kilometers before the dam, a chain was installed that retains the waste.

“It’s easier to list what we didn’t find, but we found a large amount of car waste, household appliances, pet packaging, wood pulp, dead animals, and everything we could even find medical waste, everything you can imagine that is not needed, that’s what we found”, says Siniša Laković, from the association “Jastreb” in Priboj.

In the area of ​​the municipality of Priboj, six illegal landfills were removed. The so-called environmental bomb of the Stanjevina landfill was closed and rehabilitated.

“We have one landfill, the city landfill Duboki Potok, which is still in use until the transfer station is built, from where garbage from four municipalities will come to the Duboko regional landfill,” said Dragan Ljeljen, a member of the Priboj Municipal Council.

This is an interstate problem and as long as we clean it up here, as we did on previous occasions with ten, fifteen thousand cubic meters of garbage, nothing will mean anything if it is not solved in cooperation with Montenegro and further with Bosnia and Herzegovina. From here, we protect not only our HPP Potpeć, we protect this pearl and the coast, we also protect all energy capacities in the Drina basin”, said Dragan Ljeljen, member of the Priboj Municipal Council.

Montenegro is planning a regional center for waste management in Bijelo Polje.

“It is an important infrastructural solution that should improve waste management, and the direct consequence will be that there will be less waste, of course, even in rivers. At the same time, I think we will all agree that the level of awareness and culture and our attitude towards the environment should be accompanied by legal solutions”, said Ana Novaković Đurović, Minister of Ecology, Spatial Planning and Urbanism of Montenegro.

As stated in the Water Management Plan, the current state of bilateral cooperation in the water sector is not satisfactory, neither in terms of quality nor scope.

“Absolutely, we don’t have enough monitoring in Serbia. Of the 3,200 water bodies that are currently defined for Serbia, less than 100 are regularly monitored every year. According to the results of the monitoring, if out of 100 water bodies we find that 30 are not working, probably another two and a half thousand are not working”, says Prvoslav Marjanović from the Institute for Water Management Jaroslav Černi.

Reducing plastic pollution is especially important. Investments of six billion euros are needed to reduce water losses in the water supply and increase the collection and purification of waste water.

Source: RTS