There is so much garbage from other places in the lake that it is difficult to travel there by boat. The local residents started cleaning the lake on their own, when the government briefly suspended its own cleaning campaign.
El Salvador’s largest lake, Suchitlán, is a protected area, but in reality the lake is one of the most polluted in Latin America.
Garbage from plastic bottles to cans is floating in the water. Garbage travels through Lempajoki from Guatemala, Honduras and San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador.
Local fishermen find it difficult to navigate the lake because of the debris. The government started a campaign to clean the lake but soon stopped it.
It made the local fishermen and volunteers get to work themselves. Fishermen bring trash to the beach and volunteers take it away.
– We collect an average of 350 bags of garbage per day, says one of them, Carlos Abarca news agency Reuters.
Officials in the nearby town of Potonico point out that although the residents of the area are not responsible for the pollution of the lake, they are the ones paying the price.
In El Salvador, about a fifth of the generated waste is left untreated, the country’s environment ministry says. This means that 845 tons of waste end up in waterways and beaches every day.
Source: Reuters