Plastic in Paradise: How Bali is Tackling their Surge in Marine Plastic

Bali and its tropical shorelines are often near the top of travellers’ and honeymooners’ dream destinations as swaying palm trees, white sand and crystal clear waters combine to create a slice of paradise. Unfortunately however, bronzed bodies and multicoloured umbrellas are no longer the only things which can be found strewn across Bali’s beaches. This is especially true during their monsoon season which, in the 21st century, brings not only rain but a tidal wave of plastic waste too.

October to April forms the wet monsoon season in Bali where strong winds, large waves and heavy rainfall batter the low-lying islands. This year, the monsoon weather has catapulted Bali into news headlines around the world as the powerful sets of waves and flooded rivers have washed a sea of trash onto some of the islands’ most idyllic beaches. The sands of Kuta and Legian have recently been carpeted with up to 60 tonnes of freshly dumped plastic every day during the worst of the monsoon weather and unfortunately, this is not a one-off occurrence. It seems that the mountain of trash which covers the shoreline during these few months is now almost as reliable as the hoards of tourists who descend onto Balinese beaches each year.

All this rubbish derives from two main sources, the first being the increasingly high level of ocean-going trash which exists in our global oceans. The second source is more local and is due to Bali, and Indonesia as a whole, having poor waste practices and a lack of rubbish processing facilities. Often families must take their own rubbish to the recycling or refuse centre rather than it being conveniently picked up from their doorsteps which provides a barrier to recycling for many. Even once the rubbish is collected in a central location, it is often not disposed of properly due to a lack of infrastructure and finance, with it being burned, dumped or added to landfill rather than sorted and recycled. The influx of tourists each year only exacerbates this problem by creating an enormous mountain of waste which the region struggles to deal with. 2020 aside, Bali normally receives over six million foreign visitors per year, each of whom creates on average 3.5 times more waste than a local individual as they splurge on takeaway smoothies, street food and a cheap pair of diving goggles which get used only a handful of times. The monsoon season, or the ‘rubbish season’ as it is now known locally, worsens these existing waste issues as the torrential rain causes rivers to flood and whisks dumped litter along with it to the sea. Here it meets the windblown rubbish as well as the crashing waves which dump the ocean’s salty synthetic trash onto the sand and the tideline transforms to a rubbish tip.

Balinese locals really did have a fresh, clean start to 2021 as volunteers spent New Year’s Day cleaning beaches such as Kuta. On this beach alone, 30 tonnes of rubbish were removed on the 1st of January and a whopping 60 tonnes were removed the following day. The locals are working hard to preserve the beauty of their beaches in the hope that tourists will return some time soon to help revive their local economy which has been hit hard by the Coronavirus pandemic. The governor of Bali is even discussing the possibility of trucks working 24 hours a day on these beaches during the visitor season to ensure that the local beaches live up to the promises of paradise. If the plastic is left on the sand to be swept back into the ocean, the diving, surfing and wildlife watching sectors of the tourism industry are likely to crumble whilst the local marine species, such as manta rays, turtles and reef sharks, will also fall into demise.

So whilst Indonesia is the second largest plastic polluter on the planet, they aim to cut down their waste by 70% by 2025 and become a plastic-free society by 2040. This is arguably an ambitious target which rivals some of the goals set by more developed nations and so it will be interesting to compare the progress between this rapidly developing nation and those which have been post-industrialisation for some time. Let’s take a look at some of the initiatives Indonesia already has in place to help reduce their contribution to our increasingly plastic planet.

Already, single use plastic is banned in the capital of Jakarta whilst Bali has also banned single use plastic bags, straws and Styrofoam in a bid to preserve their surrounding natural environment. The local authorities have encouraged an increasing amount of infrastructure on the islands including recycling plants and home composting systems to reduce the amount of rubbish which enters landfill. These schemes also create a new source of employment as well as new, cheap materials in the form of recycled goods. A recent tourist tax has additionally been imposed on the islands where each visitor will have to pay a $10 contribution towards protecting Bali’s environment and culture.

Yet not all work has come from a government level; in fact, one of the biggest campaigns against plastic was led by two girls aged only 12 and 10. ‘Bye Bye Plastic Bags’ was founded in 2013 and started out as two sisters giving presentations in local primary schools. When they first began, all the children who were asked said that plastic was good, yet several years on and the response is a resounding ‘no’. Today the organisation is one of the largest non-profits in Bali and the work of this charity was crucial in getting Bali to ban certain single use items. They continue to educate school children as well as run beach cleans and promote plastic alternatives to local businesses. One of their projects looks at building trash booms, a concept which is growing in popularity amongst other eco-organisations too. Floating trash booms are designed to lie across waterways and rivers in order to trap any large plastic items that flow downstream, preventing these pollutants reaching the ocean. These booms can even be made from collected litter and unwanted trash such as water bottles and washed-up fishing nets and take only a short amount of time to build. The hope is that these simple devices will be made cheaply by communities around the islands and placed in a multitude of local waterways. Once the boom is full, the waste will be sorted, washed and sent off to the new recycling centres.

At the other end of the scale, some organisations are using cutting edge technology to tackle the immense amount of marine waste that Bali is struggling to cope with. CSIRO aims to revolutionise the way we collect data on litter to help us better understand the enormous issue we are facing. Currently, most of the data we have on plastic waste derives from people going out and counting the waste that they find, a time consuming task which is limited to areas which are easy to access. CSIRO’s new technology uses remote cameras and artificial intelligence to perform the same task on a much greater scale and in a much larger geographical area. The technology sees remote cameras capture photos and videos of waterways and patches of ocean before artificial intelligence is used to analyse these files. These computers have been trained not only to detect a piece of litter but to sort it into categories such as food packaging and cigarette butts. This can give us some extremely powerful data not only about the type of pollution that is most common but also where the pollution is clustered within the environment. This can help us identify and then tackle the sources of pollution which could be, for example, a riverside takeaway company using Styrofoam boxes in an area which lacks any bins.

In the past, Indonesia has used a few more unconventional methods of tackling marine pollution but as Gary Bencheghib from ‘Make a Change’ said “at the rate that we are destroying our planet, we believe that no idea is crazy enough to protect it”. Several years ago, Indonesia’s maritime affairs minister decided to give away free goggles to children in coastal regions so that they could go diving, an activity which is common for tourists but rare for local children to get involved in. The idea behind this was that the local community would be given the eyes to really see their beautiful underwater environment and all its wildlife and want to do everything they can to protect it. This scheme went hand in hand with an increased number of environmental education programmes which tackled misconceptions and some common practices. For example, it is common in Indonesia to throw your used litter on the floor, a practice which used to be acceptable when all their packaging was made from biodegradable banana leaves or newspaper but became a bad habit once the wrapping around their food was made from plastic. Even religious leaders around the country have joined in with the environmental message by leading sermons which focus on reducing plastic waste. It is thought that these messages from respected leaders have reached over 100 million followers in Indonesia.

Bali is a great example to help debunk many of our misconceptions which surround plastic waste. It shows that even our isolated tropical islands cannot escape the torrent of plastic that we produce every day. Bali also shows that communities really are willing to make a difference and help our planet, no matter how overwhelming the problem may feel or how little financial support they have. Finally, the region also highlights that many of the solutions to our plastic problem should be grounded in the local environment and unique to each area’s circumstances. So let’s stop waiting for some overarching global solution to appear and resolve our plastic woes, let’s take a closer look on our own doorsteps and at our own practices and see how we can get stuck in to protect the patches of paradise we have at home.

By Neve McCracken-Heywood