A pair of brothers from Bali is paddling down Indonesia’s toxic Citarum
River on two kayaks they had built –custom-made from bamboo and
discarded plastic bottles — to create a “shocking visual” and “bring
awareness about the dangers of plastic pollution.”
Flowing
through industrial West Java, the Citarum is said to be the most
polluted river in the world. More than 15 million people live on the
Citarum and most of them rely on its flow for their water supply.
It’s
no news that Indonesia’s oceans are becoming trash graveyards with
heaps of rubbish washing back ashore, blemishing the country’s beautiful
beaches every year, but what doesn’t get talked about so much is that
80 percent of plastics that wind up in the ocean come from land-based
sources, specifically rivers and streams—like the Citarum in Java.
“Plastics
is having a major toll here in Indonesia. Being the biggest archipelago
in the world, we really wanted to created a shocking visual of all this
trash that’s coming in from our rivers into the ocean,” says the older
of the two brothers, Gary Bencheghib, in a video promoting the
eco-awareness project created through the brothers’ media page, Make a
Change.
