The Deputy Minister of Environment and Water Atanas Kostadinov, the Director of the Black Sea Region Basin Directorate Yavor Dimitrov, and the Advisor Petar Dimitrov, together with experts from the Ministry of Environment and Water and the Bulgarian Academy of Science, joined the water cleanup of the port of Sozopol. The initiative was organized by the Institute of Oceanology at the Bulgarian Academy of Science and marks the beginning of the summer tourist season.

The previous day, divers from the Institute of Oceanology conducted a sonar survey of the port bottom, identifying larger debris, which was today removed from the water into containers with the help of divers and by crane. Over 40 divers from the Institute, members of local diving clubs, as well as residents and guests of Sozopol participated in the cleanup.

Deputy Minister Atanas Kostadinov noted that in 2017 the condition of 45 percent of the 95 declared beach areas in Bulgaria was determined as “good”, while today 95 percent of them are assessed as “very good”.

“This is also a result of the funding by the Ministry of Environment and Water of over 250 million leva for the construction of treatment plants over the past 10 years,” Kostadinov noted. He stressed that the importance of the issue of clean environment should not remain just verbal, but should more often be translated into examples such as today’s– when the mass of waste from the bottom of the Sozopol port was cleaned up.

The aim of the initiative is not only to clean up the sea bottom, but also to popularize marine sciences, protect the marine environment, and draw public attention to the importance of joint efforts for the sustainable development of coastal zones.