The Newsroom 27

20 September 2024

How an EU project indirectly paves the way for a cleaner Meuse

What is the best way to make rivers plastic-free? Between 2018 and 2022, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany joined forces to reduce plastic litter in the river Meuse by half. The aim of the so-called LIVES project turned out rather optimistic, but it has nonetheless laid a foundation from which nature can gradually benefit.

Ruben Wissing

Français/Nederlands

How an EU project indirectly paves the way for a cleaner Meuse
With a group of 600 volunteers, Peter Alblas regularly rolls up his sleeves to clean up the banks of the river. | Ruben Wissing

North of Maastricht, the capital of the Dutch Limburg province, the banks of the river Meuse are littered with waste: from food packaging in French and cans of Spanish beer to cigarette butts and drug-related waste. It looks like a music festival just concluded. “This is just the tip of the iceberg”, says Peter Alblas, city ecologist at the Centre for Nature and Environmental Education in Maastricht (CNME). “There is still plenty of trash on the riverbed that partly surfaces when there is shallow water.” This part of the Meuse is a real litter hotspot.

This is partly due to the geography: beyond the Borgharen weir – located nearby – the riverbed has been significantly widened for flood safety, causing the flow to slow down suddenly. As a result, most of the plastic sinks or gets caught in the vegetation. Together with around twenty groups of six hundred volunteers,, Alblas regularly rolls up his sleeves to clean the river banks. “Sometimes we collect as many as forty garbage containers worth of trash in a single day”, says the city ecologist, who has been involved in nature projects along the major Dutch rivers for thirty years. The picking instruction is: anything from a bottle cap and larger. “Some people pick up all the plastic, but then you spend an entire morning on one square meter. An ketchup bottle can break down into thousands of pieces after it has been in the river for some time, so make sure bottles like these don’t end up in nature.”

This makes the problem so extensive and persistent. Much of the plastic is not easily visible, let alone catchable. It not only degrades the landscape, micro- and nanoplastics may also be harmful to our drinking water or consumed by fish that later end up on our plates. A small portion – although scientists do not know exactly how much – also flows into the sea. There, it joins the other 11 million tons of plastic that pollute the oceans annually. But the vast majority of plastic remains around land and rivers, says Tim van Emmerik, a hydrologist at Wageningen University & Research. “This likely means that the impact of plastic pollution is much greater than we previously expected, as it also affects ecosystems, flora, and fauna around rivers”, says Van Emmerick.

In 2018, the Meuse was designated as Europe’s first major cleanup test case. The European Union and Euregio Meuse-Rhine jointly invested 1.5 million euros to tackle platic pollution in Meuse’s drainage basin, including its tributaries. The goal of the LIVES project (Litter-Free Rivers and Streams) was crystal clear: plastic pollution in the Meuse had to be halved. Together with the efforts of Dutch, Belgian, and German government and knowledge institutions, NGOs, and water and waste management organisations, this task was supposed to be completed in four years. During the project 21 trash catchers were installed (from floating barriers to ‘garbage socks’ on sewer overflows), and large-scale cleanup campaigns were organised, attracting over ten thousand volunteers collecting a total of 260 tons of waste. That’s a lot, but it wasn’t a 50 percent reduction. In fact, no one could have even proven it, even if it had succeedded.

The banks of the Meuse river littered with plastic, near Maastricht (Netherlands) | Ruben Wissing

“At the time, we didn’t have a proper baseline measurement to realise our plans”, says Sylvia Spierts-Brouwer of the Dutch Institute for Environmental Education (IVN). The Limburg-based sustainability-advocate has long been committed to clean rivers and was the project manager of LIVES. “There were no suitable systems yet. We had to figure out how to do everything as we went along.” She praises the exchange of knowledge between the different countries involved, but attributes much of the lack of results to bureaucratic fuss.

“When you organise something with companies, it’s done tomorrow. When you work with multiple governments at different levels, it takes up to nine months.” For example, the aforementioned ‘garbage sock’ turned out ineffective, because in practice, the sock quickly became overloaded with waste and was difficult to empty. “If we had tested this installation earlier in the project, we could have optimised it.” Spierts-Brouwer also regrets that LIVES did not lead to a sustainable administrative commitment. In none of the participating countries were the project’s goals embedded in policy. And as of 2024, EU legislation does not assign responsibility to plastic in water. She does not attribute this to unwillingness of the parties involved, but to a lack of time, chaotic cooperation, and the political reality in Europe. “European ministers spoke commendable words at the time, but after they were replaced following elections, it remained silent.”

More than 10,000 volunteers

However, Spierts-Brouwer was not left empty-handed after the project ended. “When I got involved in river cleanups back in 2012, no one seemed to perceive plastic in rivers as a problem yet. Now, the narrative has completely shifted. People understand the urgency.” She sees awareness as LIVES’ major achievement. Since the project, more and more social organisations, busineses, and citizens have been working to clean up the Meuse.

“In 2024, for the first time, a cleanup was organised that covered the entire Dutch Meuse basin”, says Spierts-Brouwer. The organisation behind it, the Maas Cleanup, was established through the LIVES project. During the latest cleanup day in March 2024, about 14,500 volunteers collected a record of 250,000 kilos of waste. Peter Alblas also sees that his cleanup efforts do not longer just attract locals from Maastricht. More and more people from the rest of the country are signing up. “And the corporate community is also participating. Every year, men in fancy shirts come here to pick up plastic”, says Alblas.

The river current pushes the waste into the receptacle. The hinges keep it inside. | Ruben Wissing

All the way at the river mouth of the Meuse, in Rotterdam, they recognise this sentiment. Ramon Knoester, founder and director of the non-profit Clear Rivers organisation, speaks of a turning point and sees that even industries want to contribute to a healthy river. “There are now companies from the Port of Rotterdam that order our plastic litter traps”, says Knoester proudly. Clear Rivers develops its own litter traps. In addition to the traps installed for third parties in the Netherlands and abroad, they have five traps in use themselves, including one at their floating office in the Nieuwe Maas in Rotterdam. The waste collected there is recycled. “I have a background in architecture and therefore I see plastic as a sustainable building material”, says Knoester. For example, he has made a floating park out of collected trash. “A coot is now nesting there.” Although the litter traps work well, he says it is only part of the solution. “We also need to focus on prevention: ensuring that plastic no longer ends up in the water. That’s why we are working on effective management with companies that leak plastic into the environment, as well as raising awareness and providing education.”

But how effective are cleanup actions and plastic catchers? Van Emmerik cannot say with certainty. According to the researcher, seven years of data have been collected on plastic on the banks of the Meuse, but that is not enough for a trend analysis. “We don’t know if plastic waste is increasing or decreasing. Only in five to ten years can we cautiously say something about it”, says Van Emmerik. So far, they have had to rely on limited measurement methods, mainly looking at how much litter is visibly floating on the river.

Globally, in around a hundred other rivers, floating plastic has been measured in a similar way. “The Meuse is relatively dirty”, says Van Emmerik. “Especially during the 2021 flood, the values were higher than any other river measured using the same method up to that point.” This also applies in comparison to rivers in, for example, Ghana and Indonesia, which are, according to the researcher, often unfairly perceived as being much more polluted than European ones. Van Emmerik points out that plastic is an umbrella term, but that each river has different litter. “It’s a heterogeneous problem: the chain of each plastic item is different, and thus the intended intervention strategies should be as well. You often hear about banning plastic. That’s too generalised. We’re not going to make IV bags out of paper. A possible adjustment of infrastructure is often more effective than to redesign the product itself. In Ghana and Amsterdam, we create a narrative for the ten most common pieces of plastic found in or near rivers. Where would the most logical intervention points be in the chain? They are probably not all in the same place”, says Van Emmerik.

Back to the Meuse. Although the LIVES project has not had a follow-up project and there is still too little crucial data available as of 2024, the Meuse is crying out for solutions, literally. At least, it will in the near future, through an AI avatar. In October, Milan Meyberg from Amsterdam won the Marc Cornelissen Brightlands Award with his project Emissary of GAIA: an AI tool to give the Meuse a voice. “You can literally talk to the ecosystem, just as you would with other people”, says the sustainability strategist who collaborates with Maas Cleanup and several busineses, among others. “It’s for everyone. The Meuse can soon ‘sit in’ as a 3D hologram in a boardroom filled with CEOs, but also text-message young people having a beer on the river banks.”

Clear Rivers’ Rotterdam office includes a floating recycling park | Ruben Wissing

The avatar is fed with a plethora of data: from statistics and graphs to cultural-historical books and poetry pieces. How the Meuse will look exactly, Meyberg cannot yet say, but it will have human features. “It’s about giving the Meuse a face and character that we humans can accept.” The Meuse is the first river to ever get its own AI avatar, but environmental personhood has been around for ages. “Aborigines and tribes in South America all have a personal relationship with ecosystems. It’s like having a friend, a family member. You treat them with respect”, says Meyberg. It is not at all unthinkable that (local) governments will want to engage with the tool in the future: the South Limburg municipality of Eijsden-Margraten recently voted to make their part of the Meuse (and an ajacent forest) a legal entity. The river will therefore technically be able to take someone to court. Something similar has already been introduced successfully in Spain and Ecuador, for example.

According to Meyberg, Emissary of GAIA should first get recognised as legitimate. “The next step would be to be allowed to advise at council meetings and executive meetings. That’s how emancipation movements go. Who knows, maybe the Meuse will be able to vote or even veto in the future?” A first pilot of the Dutch AI avatar is expected in November, but Meyberg is already looking ahead. “After that, we can scale up to Belgium and France, to include the entire Meuse basin.” If it were up to him, it could even be rolled out pan-European, a ‘United Rivers of Europe’: “Protecting nature is after all a core value of the European Union.”

Sylvia Spierts-Brouwer is very enthusiastic about Meyberg’s initiative. Due to initiatives like this and the involvement of social organisations, the business community, and volunteers, she has high hopes for the future. However, she underscores the importance of European cooperation to make significant sustainable progress. “A river system is like a family, from the capillaries to the ocean. Rivers do not recognise country borders. We all share the responsibility to take care of it. Therefore, we must continue to seek that European cooperation”, says Spierts-Brouwer.

European unionThis article was produced as part of The Newsroom 27 competition, organised by Slate.fr with the financial support of the European Union. The article reflects the views of the author and the European Commission cannot be held responsible for its content or use.