Water Falling & Water Rising Festivals

Courtesy of Doug Woodring, Ocean Recovery Alliance, Tonlé Sap Lake, Cambodia.

Doug Woodring describes the Water Falling Festival and Water Rising Festival, two related events that Ocean Recovery Alliance created with NGO2 in Siem Reap. “It is a program to bring about water awareness and pride for keeping the Tonlé Sap Lake clean. This is the first time that an organized events have happened in villages in this area to bring thinking and education about trash, plastic pollution, and how to improve the waste management issues. It has now involved thousands of local villagers, fishermen, students, local government and the monks.

We hold the festivals twice a year, once when the water in the lake falls in November and December, to catch the plastic before it goes out to the lake (Cambodia’s Inland Ocean), and in June, for the Water Rising Festival, before the water brings the plastic from the lake and riverbanks back into the villages.

This year also involved a big cleanup on the Siem Reap River, downstream of the city, with the use of new nets that were set up by the local communities and fishermen, with the help of our Global Alert App for reporting and showing the location of trash hotspots in our waters anywhere in the world (www.globalalert.org). We removed over 15 tons of material in 6 weeks of effort, most of it by hand.”

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