Two thousand tyres have been recovered after a clean-up operation at a river involving 150 volunteers.
Chief executive of charity Keep Wales Tidy, Owen Derbyshire, told Sky News it was “an unbelievable achievement” to bring so many different people together at the River Ogmore.
“It does point to a deeper problem I think about our relationship with rivers and the challenge we’ll all be facing in trying to clean them up on a national level.”
Mr Derbyshire said there needs to be a “step change” in approach to large-scale litter and waste.
“I don’t think anybody expected to see so many tyres in the river and if you look at it at low-tide, you can see lots of tyres, trollies, fridges, we saw a couple of armchairs right in the middle of the river and the truth is they could have come from any direction.”
This stretch of the river had been a “hotspot” for a number of years but the scale of the waste was unexpected, according to Mr Derbyshire.
“We couldn’t have imagined that it would be quite so severe and you do have to think about the impact that has, not just on the communities that are forced to live with this, it actually is a beautiful part of the world, but also the nature and wildlife that are harmed because of incidents like these,” he said.
Mr Derbyshire said it is suspected the amount of waste was as a result of “industrial pollution rather than one-off events”.
But he said the number of people who helped clear the river was reassuring. Local resident Alun had been planning the clean for years, and brought the volunteers together.
“It was incredibly encouraging to see so many people get together with that positive attitude to try and do their bit to look after the local area, but the truth is it shouldn’t really be on the shoulders of volunteers alone longer term,” he said.