The heap of plastic shards, bottles and bags in the garden behind the house is a kind of cry for help. Just a few kilometres from the tourist beaches on the Tunisian island of Djerba, it screams up at the sky like a colossal SOS.
But there are no tourists here in Zarzis, where Mohsen Lihidheb has created a private museum – of everything that the Mediterranean washes up.
“Most people in the village think I’m crazy,” says Lihidheb. “But I am completely clear in my mind – and above all, consistent.”
The 66-year-old walks along the beach almost every day and collects what he finds. He started cleaning up the beaches near his home village, which has not been touched by the hotel boom in the area, 26 years ago.
“Eventually even my wife got sick of the pile of trash in the back garden,” he says. “But this is a memorial to the ocean.”
Over the years, Lihidheb has collected around 500,000 plastic bottles. He knows this because he’s kept a record in a notebook of all the items he has collected.
But this number seems tiny when you consider that, according to a study by wildlife organisation WWF, around 33,800 plastic bottles are thrown into the Mediterranean every minute.
The Mediterranean is one of the world’s most polluted oceans. According to the UN, the reasons for this include the dense population in the area, large numbers of tourists, busy shipping traffic and little water circulation.
WWF says Egypt, Italy and Turkey bear the most responsibility for the enormous quantities of waste. When its report was published in summer 2019, Guiseppe die Carlo, head of WWF’s Mediterranean programme, said all countries in the region are failing to do enough to collect and recycle plastic.
Most holidaymakers who visit the beaches of Italy would be completely unaware of this, as the beaches often have private owners who take responsibility for keeping them clean.
But from Liguria to Sicily, the sea is full of plastic. Fisherman in the region often end up with more plastic in their nets than fish, according to Italian ocean and environmental protection body Ispra.
Ispra says around 8 million tons of plastic are ending up in the world’s oceans every year, 7 per cent of it in the Mediterranean. Most of it is carried to the sea in rivers.
Animals are dying as a result. More and more dead whales are being found washed up on the Italian coast. In the spring, for example, a pregnant female was found with more than 20 kilos of plastic in her stomach.
According to Ispra, a study of more than 1,400 loggerhead sea turtles found that two-thirds had swallowed plastic.
In Egypt, adventurer Omar El Galla is no longer willing to stand by and watch this environmental tragedy unfold. In October, he embarked on a three-month swim along 900 kilometres of the Red Sea to draw attention to the problem of plastic waste.
“I truly believe I can change something,” the 31-year-old told dpa before he set off.
El Galla was planning to take 8 to 10 kilograms of luggage with him on the swim, including a satellite tracking device. A camera operator and assistant were due to follow him on land, bunking up with him at night in the Egyptian desert.
“It’s a bit crazy,” El Galla said. “We’ll see how it goes.”
The biggest attempt yet to clean up the world’s oceans, the Ocean Cleanup project, was launched in 2019 by Dutchman Boyan Slat. He says the first successes of the project are already being seen in the Pacific. The system, developed by an international team, collects plastic waste in specially designed nets.
These consist of 600-metre-long tubes in a U-shape with a three-metre curtain attached to them to collect the plastic waste.
The devices have been deployed in the Pacific between California and Hawaii, where there are currently 1.8 trillion pieces of floating plastic, according to scientists. The success of the project is to be evaluated after three months, and it may then be expanded.
One problem in Tunisia, according to the Heinrich Boell Foundation, is that the local authorities lack the necessary means to clean the beaches. The communities are dependent on volunteers like Lihidheb.
The make-up of his memorial to the ocean has changed over the past 30 years, he says.
“In the 1990s it was mostly glass bottles, lots of them from Italy,” he says. Then the plastic and fishing nets started coming.
Behind the rubbish pile is a collection of washed-up dolphin skulls. There is also a pile of orange life jackets. “The ocean never forgets,” Lihidheb says. – dpa
