Sustainable Coastlines update (November 2009)
- posted by Michael Walsh on November 30th, 2009
- (0)
Dear Michael,
I’ve been so busy picking up rubbish that I haven’t had time to fill you in on those busy weeks leading up to the event. The cleanup was a great success and now it’s time to tell you about how we made it happen. It all started with mapping the rubbish…
RUBBISH MAPPING
The Village Youth Groups showed me around the islands to map out the types and volumes of rubbish along the coastline. I learnt how to machete the top off a coconut while they got to grips with the ENL Navigation GPS and Google Earth.
On the east coast beaches we found all sorts of washed-up marine debris, from surfboards to washing baskets, and an abundance of tiny fragments of weathered plastic. The Ha’apai Islands are exposed to south-easterly trade winds that force the current in a westerly direction across the Pacific Ocean. This carries in waste from far-off countries.
However on the west coast beaches, where we find the villages, it’s a different story. Rather than the even distribution of plastic in the tide-line, we found large dumps of household rubbish in spot locations – heaps of burning plastic bags, tin cans, car batteries and soiled nappies.
A small group of volunteers did a preliminary cleanup of the main village, Pangai. In two-and-a-half hours just 20 people collected a third of a tonne of rubbish from 1km of coastline. This staggering amount of rubbish gave us an indication of the quantity of rubbish on the beaches to form a logistical plan for its removal.
The general conclusion was that there’s SO MUCH RUBBISH – scattered on beaches, piled outside homes and dumped in the bush – that the only way to do it was to divert a Reef Shipping vessel into Pangai. But the limiting factor for the number of containers was the size of the tiny wharf! The span of the crane on the ship needs to reach them all as there’s no heavy duty forklift or truck on the island.
Eight full containers are now lined up on the wharf awaiting removal next month – we collected about a quarter of Ha’apai’s rubbish in this first event.
More soon!
Emily
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Emily Penn | +676 8895025
Operations Manager | Sustainable Coastlines
emily@sustainablecoastlines.org | www.sustainablecoastlines.org
