Thunder in paradise

For the day-tripper who arrives at Mari-Mari Backpackers resort, who skulls quietly in the warm, aqua blue sea, who takes a boat out to the coral and who wriggles their toes in the fine dusty sand…This is paradise.

But take a stroll 200m either side of the resort and you are brought with a thundering crash back down to Earth. There is litter everywhere. And I’m not talking about the odd coke can: I’m talking plastic bottles, netting, flipflops, toothpaste, carrier bags, nappies… It’s like an exquisite pearl that’s been dropped in a sewage tank so that only tiny little glimmers of sparkle can peak through. It’s humbling, it’s devastating and it I’m afraid to say it makes you despise human kind.

It’s like opening a shiny new bicycle and finding out it has rust all over it.

There’s a village on the island which you could walk to from our lodge in about 20 minutes and this is even more heart-breaking as it is strewn with litter, in every tiny nook and cranny. Cows roam freely chewing on crisp packets, cats curl up on plastic sacks and bare-footed children play amongst the rubbish: The sand that slides through their naked toes is not powdery and white, but grey and slimy.

I don’t think the villagers are the only culprits: I think in fact a large amount of waste on the beaches away from the village has washed in from the sea, but there is clearly a huge issue here that somehow needs to be addressed. We asked in our resort what happens to waste produced on the island and they said that a boat carries it away once a week-surely nowhere near frequently enough.

It’s hard visiting somewhere like this and just observing. We felt we needed to do something, so we collected rice sacks that we found along the shoreline and spent an hour each day picking up litter and putting it in the sacks. In total we picked up 8 sacks of plastic bottles (we estimate each sack had well over 100 flattened bottles in) and 4 sacks of rubbish which we handed over to the staff of our backpackers much to their horror and bemusement. I can guarantee that by the time I’m writing this, the stretch we cleared will already be starting to accumulate more litter, but it’s a token and it made us feel like at least our impact on the island was a positive one. Bro has also written to the company owner to see if they can do more (no response yet).

I hate to be negative, and I have to say that despite this, we absolutely loved our tiny glimmer of sparkle on this fragile little island, but I just wanted to share this in the hope that even one person is affected by this and perhaps rethinks their own impact on this Earth.

This does make me feel let down by people. Closer to home, apparently 62% of people in England drop litter although only 28% admit to it. I did a survey with my wonderful tutor group last year to find out how many of them drop litter and about two thirds admitted to it. Perhaps what upset me more than this was the fact that after a few weeks of me doing a ‘let’s learn about why littering is destroying the Earth’ campaign with them, a whopping third of them still admitted to dropping litter, despite everything we’d been discussing (most claiming the reason that despite knowing the consequences, they didn’t want to be seen not to in front of their friends). And that’s only the ones who admitted to it. 

However, I am reassured that my own friends are not the people dropping litter. That said, I still think we can all reflect on the amount of packaging we use, and maybe think of one or two ways we can reduce it. Perhaps it is buying a Keep Cup so there’s one less plastic coffee cup in the bin (you get to feel smug every time you have a coffee!!). Perhaps it’s refilling your waterbottle from the tap rather than buying a new one. Perhaps it is keeping hold of your empty bottle until you find a recycling bin, rather than throwing into general waste. Whatever we do, we have as a human race, a responsibility to start fighting this issue, and I guess the easiest way to start is by changing our own actions.  

Rant over.

PS If you want to read a little more about litter issues and projects in the UK, have a look here J