Inner Harbour of Vlissingen

Ah, the Inner Harbour of Vlissingen - Jan's Arch Nemesis! Regardless from which angle you see this harbour, you will find trash… this is why, even after our initial data collection with Lorenzo, we continued clean-ups and monitoring of litter in the inner harbour. Despite being continued out of spite, the harbour clean-ups grew quite successfull with many students getting involved, and made the issue of the harbour pollution visible to the workers at the harbour! As part of his work, Lorenzo also stuck a camera towards the bottom of the harbour. The result? No ground in sight - only trash! Based on his work we also released a report on the litter problem in the Inner Harbour for the Municipality of Vlissingen.

COVENANT SCHONE SCHELDE

Our clean-ups are and have always been our poster child for HZ's commitment to Covenant Clean Scheldt - an agreement signed by 34 organisations around the Scheldt, to keep our river clean. This finally lead to a group of interested people to work on the issue of the Inner Harbour. This group includes us, the Municipality of Vlissingen, Doe Mee Verlos de Zee, Rijkswaterstaat, and of course, the Province of Zeeland. It is proving difficult more difficult than anticipated, but we are making progress, slowly but surely.

MONITORING METHOD

We used to have separate monitoring sessions the day after our clean-ups. However, eventually we found a way to make monitoring more efficient. The early monitoring sessions used a monitoring method that was developed for river banks called OSPAR, which has 8 pages of examples of items you could find. And while this was great as a basis, going through this monstrosity of a list per item was tedious. So, after getting a first initial data set we made our own tally list, based on OSPAR, but only 1 paper long with the most common items and 2/3 of the back page empty, so that it could be filled in by hand for one off items. This list could then be filled in at the same time as the litter was collected! See our monitoring list here: (link monitoring list?)

THE REAL PROBLEM

The pollution of the Inner Harbour would not even be a big concern to us, if it were a closed system… but it's not! Sure, there is a lock going towards the Scheldt, and a bridge that marks the physical end of the harbour - but water can still go to the Scheldt with trash in it, but worst of all, the bridge is the beginning of a canal that goes all the way to Middelburg and equally as far beyond that to Veere, without physical intervention! The water way simply continues. And sure, the adjacent canal and marina's aren't really made for swimming, so it can't be that bad, right? WRONG - IT GETS WORSE!

See, animals and plants don't care about where we think they should be or not… the harbour is an ecosystem! There are plenty of birds and fish that have made it part of their habitat, we have even seen rabbits on the edges of this harbour! And litter is just one of the types of pollution, there is oil leakage, there are bright lights at night and it's loud! Ask people living on the Piet Heinkade. All of that disturbs the natural rythm for life in the area - oh, and don't even get us started on the toxins released into the air by the ships… ok, sorry, rant over.

HOTSPOTS

While the entire harbour is essentially its own hotspot, for the sake of thorough monitoring we chose 5 sections to keep an eye on twice per academic year, giving us semi regular time phrames per hotspot.

1: The lock, actually the grassy corners next to the tidal waterwork next to the locks.

2: The Piet Heinkade or "The DAMEN Corner" by DAMEN Yachting, as this is the common down wind side of the harbour.

3: The Red Bridge corner next to a busy road and bike path - birds love this corner to chill or fight over food.

4: Inner Harbour 1, home to the rabbits that once reigned supreme on the west shore on a meadow by the bunker.

And 5: Inner Harbour 2, the home of the Fishing Industry!

THE DATA (MAIN ITEMS)

Unsurprisingly, the main source of the litter in the Inner Harbour comes from the fishing industry. If the item isn't vispluis (see "Specific Items" subpage) then it was the polystereen… the white packaging used for keeping fish cooled, by a white, super light material that breaks into tiny pebbles and flies away like snow.

The second big source of litter was single use packaging: wrapping paper, plastic bottles and drinking cans, et cetera.

Other common items include cigarette butts and their boxes, shoe protectors, lighters, facemasks, zip ties and scrunchies.

The favourite obscure item that was also relatively common was shoes - just one at a time though, and not once was the other one found. Across our years of clean-ups there have been 6 shoes found so far!?!