Five tons of garbage collected from a beach near Baku

Volunteers and activists, together with employees of UN agencies in Azerbaijan, collected five tons of garbage from a beach in Buzovna, a village on the outskirts of Baku. Collected plastic bottles and bags, cans, cigarette butts and other waste were all sent to the Clean City factory for processing.

The action took place as part of the Environment Week project, timed to coincide with World Environment Day.

For 2018, the theme of Environment Day is ‘Fighting Plastic Pollution’. The idea is to encourage people to reconsider their habits and limit the use of plastic bottles and packaging, which causes great harm to the environment and wildlife once discarded.

Moreover, billboards went up in the Baku Metro calling to abandon the use of plastic bags.

Discussions around the pollution of Baku’s beaches begin every summer in Azerbaijan. Activists and volunteers meet through social network platforms and independently clean up different beaches, each time collecting heaps of not only plastic, but also food waste, broken glass and other debris. However, this is short-lived, and by the middle of the season the beaches are once again full of bottles, cigarette butts and watermelon crusts.

This applies, in general, to public beaches that are not fenced off and do not belong to any hotel or restaurant.

Under the law passed several years ago, the wrongful disposal of waste is punishable by fine; however the penalty is rarely, if ever, enforced.