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‘Plastic Cup’ Competitions Are Cleaning Up Rivers in Hungary
Hundreds of muddy plastic bottles, chunks of Styrofoam, car tires and even the odd refrigerator are piled high on a raft afloat on the river Tisza, about 90 miles northeast of Budapest, Hungary. Every now and then, a canoe pulls up to the raft, which is jokingly referred to as “the mothership.” The canoe unloads large yellow sacks full of plastic waste collected from the water, the occupants exchange laughs and have a bite to eat from the mothership’s surprisingly well-stocked pantry, and then they set off again to hunt for more plastic trash.
Every sack is recorded and tied up as the pile grows. This is important, because each canoe represents one of 15 teams, gathered on the Tisza to compete in the Plastic Cup, or PET Kupa. And the team with the biggest haul of trash wins.
Since its start in 2013, the Plastic Cup has inspired teams to build boats and rafts using floats made with hundreds of plastic bottles that they have fished out of the water. Afloat on these boats, teams embark on a mad treasure hunt, collecting waste wherever they find it.
A team transfers their trash to the PET Kupa mothership. Credit: Geetanjali Krishna
Believe it or not, the germ of the idea of a plastic collecting contest grew out of a documentary film. In 2008, while making a film on sand martins nesting on the banks of the Tisza, director Attila Dávid Molnár witnessed a flood of plastic bottles in the river, so many that he and his crew could barely see the water. “I knew we had to do something special about it,” he says. “This was not something that called for individual action or a warning video, it rather called for a movement.”
The Tisza, which drains into the Danube, is one of Europe’s most heavily plastic-contaminated rivers. Together, these rivers contribute the bulk of the plastics polluting the Black Sea. Globally, plastics make up 80 percent of all marine pollution, and scientists predict that at this rate, by 2050, they could outweigh all the fish in the sea.
For the next two years, Molnár stewed over the question of how to get local communities involved in cleaning up the Tisza and the Danube. Then, in a book club, he heard about a “funny guy who built a plastic bottle boat.” This was David de Rothschild, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer who, in 2009, decided to raise awareness about marine plastic pollution by embarking on an 8,000 nautical mile voyage on the Pacific from San Francisco to Sydney — in a boat made of 12,500 plastic bottles.
Plastic bottle “floats” beneath the Plastic Cup boats. Credit: Geetanjali Krishna
Molnár was inspired to script a documentary series, in which friends and family, calling themselves the Plastic Pirates, came together to build and sail a boat with bottles collected from the river. This grew into the idea of the Plastic Cup — in a hat tip to the America’s Cup regatta — where teams built their own boats and rafts with plastic bottles and competed to collect trash from the Danube.
When the first Cup was held in 2013, merely four boats competed. But the idea took root: Participants appreciated the waste collecting as much as they enjoyed being out in the summer sun, and today, three to five Plastic Cup competitions are held every year, in which over 60 teams participate. Each team has at least eight members, mostly students, companies, NGO staff, lawyers and even academics.
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At the first event of 2025 on the Tisza, 15 teams are enjoying a sunny day on the water, kitted out in protective gloves and lifejackets. Each team has designated sorters, who separate bottles from their caps, which PET Kupa recycles into a variety of products, including kayaks. A team from the Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences recalls how they found 100 liter cans of oil underwater during a previous competition, while others dream of finding their trashy el dorado, a big “plastic mine,” which is how they refer to large heaps of waste, clumped together in river bends by the tide. “Find one of those, and you can win the competition,” says Vishwa Vipul Raunak, scouring the riverbank with his colleagues from the Budapest office of the telecom corporation Nokia.
Director Attila Dávid Molnár. Courtesy of Attila Dávid Molnár
A ripple of excitement goes through the group. One of the contestants has found a message in a bottle. Everyone aboard the mothership gathers around as he unscrews the cap, warped but intact despite having been underwater for a while, judging from the condition of the bottle. The paper is discolored and brittle. Instead of the love letter or SOS message that other participants are speculating about, it is a medical prescription. In Romanian.
The find encourages participants as they discuss the sources of the plastic waste they have found. “A lot of it comes from upstream of the Tisza, mostly Ukraine,” says Krisztián Berberovics, who is managing the present contest for PET Kupa. Just then, another cry sounds from the edge of the mothership. Volunteers have found yet another large plastic container full of used oil, too heavy to pull out. It is also probably from Ukraine, they surmise. The country’s waste management system was not robust to begin with, but has been made worse by the war. Reports suggest that streams of garbage move from Ukraine to Hungary along the Tisza River at a speed of 100 bottles per minute.
This has been PET Kupa’s biggest challenge. “Four years ago, we felt we’d succeeded in cleaning a lot of plastic from the Tisza basin. Then came Covid, and then came the Russia-Ukraine war, which completely changed how people behaved and how they thought about waste management and sustainability, ” Molnár says.
“This trash, it knows no borders,” says Gábor Korompay, who is participating in the Cup with his team from Bee Wise KFT, an IT company based in Budapest. “All we can do is fish it out.”
While many people are drawn to the Cup just to have some outdoor fun, the events have resulted in a discernible impact. The International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River, which comprises 15 countries through which the river flows that have pledged to maintain and improve the quality of the Danube River and its environment, has stated that the project has removed over 450 tons of plastic waste from the Danube and its tributaries. Preventive measures have also stopped over 1,250 tons of waste from entering the rivers. Thousands of volunteers from five countries have participated in hundreds of river clean-up actions. And the project has also demonstrated that over 60 percent of riverine plastics can be recycled once properly treated.
But the impact goes beyond these numbers, Molnár says. Participating in the Plastic Cup fundamentally changes people’s perception of the river and its pollution. “You touch the plastic with your own hands, you build something out of it and you do something good for the river,” Molnár says. “To me, this is the biggest measure of our impact.”
Teams have hauled up all sorts of trash: Styrofoam, pool noodles, tires and of course bottles. Courtesy of PET Kupta
The participants agree. “We’d heard about plastic pollution in the Tisza and Danube, so we haven’t really been surprised by the amount of trash we’re collecting,” says Raunak. “But it makes you think about your own plastic use.” Another contestant, Boldizsár Szuromi, remarks, “It’s crazy to think that some of these bottles could be 10 years old and have still not disintegrated!”
PET Kupa’s activities also include Lit(t)eracy, its outreach program, and the River Saver Network of schools and universities in four countries through which the Danube flows. “Our mobile exhibition, River Litter Lab, gets students thinking about plastic pollution,” notes Budapest-based lawyer Szilvia Olajos, a PET Kupa volunteer. “The idea is for the new generation to be more aware of their consumer choices.”
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However, much more needs to be done to prevent plastic from getting into waterways in the first place, Molnar says, adding that he believes “single use plastics should not exist at all.” He estimates that there are 2.6 tons of garbage per river kilometer in the Tisza: “The task is huge and our solution is small.” Preventing future “plastic floods” will require a complete restructuring of consumer habits and entail a basin-wide strategy for the countries in the Danube-Tisza basins that specifically addresses plastic waste management. To this end, Molnár says that in between events, PET Kupa pays for professional river clean ups. The organization has also convinced over 40 schools and NGOs in five countries to adopt and maintain stretches of 15 European rivers and is developing best practices for removing — and recycling — waste from waterways using renewable energy.
In the meantime, afloat in their plastic boats on the Tisza, teams are having fun hauling bottles out of the water. “We didn’t win last year but that’s not important,” Raunak says. “We helped clean the river, and that’s a big win, isn’t it?”
The post ‘Plastic Cup’ Competitions Are Cleaning Up Rivers in Hungary appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
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