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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.