In the summer time, the sun rises early over the Mediterranean. The beach is still almost devoid of people. The city cleaning staff has already started with the laborious cleaning. They free the fine-grained sand from bags, bottles, cans, lighters, clothes and packaging waste. It is not only the beach that is getting littered every day, but the water quality of the Mediterranean Sea is also in an alarming state.
The Mediterranean coast is densely populated. Many coastal towns do not have sewage treatment plants and instead discharge their wastewater directly into the Mediterranean Sea. On top of this comes the pollution caused by oil tankers that carry out illegal tank rinsing on the open sea. Industry and agriculture also pollute the Mediterranean with waste and hazardous substances, which reach the sea through rivers. In 2018, one of the most devastating environmental scandals in the Mediterranean occurred in the city of Gabès in south-east Tunisia. German radio station Deutschlandfunk reported that a chemical factory there discharged radioactive and carcinogenic waste, which was produced during phosphate production, directly into the sea.
In the future, Germany’s role in fighting pollution could be to revise its own waste management and establish a more sustainable local plastic cycle based on local recycling. Initial measures have also been decided at EU level: Around eight billion of the approximately 100 billion plastic bags consumed annually in the EU will end up in the world’s oceans, according to the European Parliament in 2015.
Source: The New Federalist
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