EU Delegation leads beach clean-up on Africa's largest fresh-water lake

Delegation staff, led by the Head of Delegation, Ambassador Attilio Pacifici, collected large quantities of trash that - mainly included plastic waste such as water bottles, bags, fishing lines, broken ropes, pieces of fish nets, etc. The event was held as part of this year's global #EUBeachCleanUp action, organised to mark the International Coastal Clean-up Day celebrated on September 15.

"The fishing community on Lake Victoria are using a huge number of plastic bottles and bags as floaters and sinkers for their fish nets. After use, this plastic waste should be made available for recycling instead of being dumped in the Lake," said Ambassador Pacifici. "The shores of lake Victoria, particularly near fishing villages and fish-landing sites, are littered with plastic items. Today we collected a lot of that and we have begun to sensitise the communities about the dangers of plastic pollution to lakes, rivers and oceans."

The exercise that started initially with only EU Delegation staff was boosted with the support of the local community, after dozens of kids and young people joined the beach clean-up.

Entebbe Municipal Council supported the drive and deployed a garbage collection truck to collect all the trash from the beach clean-up for dumping at Nkumba dumping site.