PARADISE LOST TO PLASTIC
Briton’s anguish over idyllic island swamped by seaborne waste
WHeN kayaker Duncan Murrell paddled up to Manyaifun island, he was stunned by its crystal clear waters and pristine sand beaches.
But it did not take long for the picture of paradise to fade – as Mr Murrell woke the next morning to discover it had fallen victim to the curse of worldwide plastic pollution.
The British conservationist, 65, had stopped off at the island’s remote fishing village while on a month- long island- hopping expedition through Raja Ampat in Indonesia.
Overnight, he found its untouched shoreline had become strewn with a thick layer of plastic waste carried from Vietnam, the Philippines and beyond. He watched in horror as locals scooped up enough rubbish to fill around a dozen wheelbarrows – later discovering it was a task they are forced to undertake after every windy night.
And with no way to recycle the plastic nearby, the 200 islanders have no choice but to dump the litter in the island’s mangrove forest, which is now chock-full of plastic waste and threatening the village’s beautiful flora and fauna.
Mr Murrell, from Torbay in Devon, said: ‘I’m fully aware of the growing environmental scourge of plastic marine pollution. But I was staggered by how much plastic marine garbage was dumped on the beautiful beach there in 24 hours. You think you are going to some remote location, to camp in some idyllic paradise, but you wake up to find plastic crap everywhere.’
As part of its Turn the Tide on Plastic Campaign, the Daily Mail has been exposing the threat to the environment posed by worldphotographer, wide plastic waste. Mr Murrell’s story follows reports that items found in 20ft mounds of rubbish in the Malaysian jungle had the logos of British supermarkets located 6,500 miles away.
Mr Murrell, an award-winning spent a month kayaking around the Indonesian archipelago of Raja Ampat, which lies within the ecologically rich Coral Triangle.
Made up of hundreds of junglecovered islands, it is home to nearly 600 species of reef coral, six of the world’s seven marine turtle species and more than 2,000 species of reef fish.
He told how the debris turns up on Manyaifun after every overnight storm, funnelled there due to prevailing winds and waves. Most of the plastic waste comes from Sarong in Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
He said: ‘It blew me away. The adults just shrugged their shoulders. It was clearly a familiar sight. It was just one day of rubbish – and it’s not even the windy season. I kept thinking about how much work they have to do to clean the beach every time it happens. It must wear them down.
‘It’s coming from outside. It’s nothing to do with them. And it’s getting dumped on to their beach all the time.
‘They were forced to go out there and scrape it up. They were out there with wheelbarrows and were dumping it in the mangroves. What else can they do with it?
‘It’s what they have to do when the wind blows. They have nothing else they can do with the rubbish except dump it in the mangroves behind the houses.’
He added: ‘It’s heart-breaking. I was really upset. I felt really emotional. These places are being killed. These places are being left to die.
‘We can’t promote them without protecting them. It’s a horrible example of development having such different outcomes.’