The bridge by the quarry at Kosovrasti. A van pulls up. A man gets out, takes out bags and boxes full of rubbish, throws them over the railing into the river Radika and drives off. The whole scene was filmed and published by the Debar sport angling society Trofta.

The Radika is one of the cleanest rivers in the country - and one of the few that can still be described that way without irony. That is also why the footage is spreading: this is not a landfill, this is a river where people fish for trout.

The Interior Ministry replied that the Ohrid regional police are taking steps to establish the person's identity and that the public will be informed accordingly. That is the correct institutional response and there is nothing to fault in it - except that it arrived after an angling society filmed and published the footage itself.

Who caught him

And there is the point of the story. The river is not guarded by an inspectorate, nor by a utility service, nor by a camera. It is guarded by anglers who happened to be there with a phone. Every day when nobody is holding a camera at that bridge, the same thing happens without consequence - and the bridge by the quarry is hardly the only place where someone unloads bags into water.

The man in the footage made a choice. He was not short of somewhere to take the waste; he was short of a reason not to throw it in the river. That is his own act and it is worth naming as such.

The second question, though, is why the arithmetic worked for him. If he takes the bags to a container, he spends fuel and time. If he throws them off a bridge, he spends nothing and the risk is close to zero - unless someone happens to be standing there with a camera. As long as that is the equation, the footage will be the exception, not the rule.

If the Ohrid police find the man, there will be one identified offender and one criminal report. That is good. But the river will keep depending on who happened to be on the bank - for as long as monitoring the places where waste regularly ends up in the water stays somebody's goodwill instead of somebody's job description.