Tiny island's giant war on waste

Updated

A community of just 600 people isolated in the Indian Ocean is being inundated with the world's plastic waste. It is now finding innovative ways to fight back.

Australia's 'best' beach

In 2016, the beach on Direction Island was named the best in Australia.

It never had a name, but after the honour was bestowed it was hurriedly given one by locals — Cossies Beach — after then-governor-general Sir Peter Cosgrove.

Pictures of the idyllic location, and the coral reef off its shores, went all over the world and boosted the profile of the Cocos Islands as a remote tropical paradise.

The community is fiercely proud of the pristine, sandy stretch on the uninhabited island, which is covered in a dense forest of coconut palms and faces the clear blue water of the lagoon.

Every Australia Day residents gather at Cossies Beach for a swim and sausage sizzle, and they are meticulous about cleaning up — bottles and cans go in the recycling bins, and nothing is left on the ground or thrown in the water.

But a short walk to the northern tip of Direction Island, where the ocean meets the lagoon, and it becomes clear that the locals don't just have their own waste to worry about.

Thousands of plastic items and other waste from around the world — bottles, bags, rubber shoes, cans — have washed ashore, while shredded plastic has become enmeshed in the coral and undergrowth.

The community holds regular clean-up days and bags of gathered ocean plastic await collection.

Wrong place, wrong time

In 2017, scientists from the University of Tasmania surveyed the Cocos Islands and concluded its beaches were holding around 414 million pieces of rubbish, weighing 238 tonnes.

At least a quarter of the identifiable objects were single-use plastics, and more than 60 per cent of the pieces collected were microplastics that had broken down into "bite-sized pieces".

Jennifer Lavers, the lead researcher, said that despite its isolation, the atoll was in an "unfortunate geographic position" when it came to ocean waste.

"There's a really strong current that comes across the northern Timor Sea and northern Indian Ocean that unfortunately transports quite a significant amount of debris from South-East Asia."

"It was things like straws, bottle caps, shoes, toothbrushes — the quantity of toothbrushes and cigarette lighters and things like that was just truly remarkable," she added.

"I think this highlights the fact that these products are definitely neither [single-use nor disposable], and that that kind of mysterious place that we call 'away', when we throw things away, sometimes that is a remote island."

The debris washes up all over the islands' outer coastline.

"When you're walking around on the back of the islands you can literally see it just coming in," shire spokesman Mohammed Minkom.

Going green

But the Cocos Islands community (population 600) isn't giving in to the waves of plastic without a fight.

Instead, the residents are committed to regular beach clean-ups and an innovative program to recycle as much waste as they can.

"We're trying to go green," Mr Minkom said.

On Home Island, where 80 per cent of the population lives, cars have been replaced by electric-powered golf buggies and quad bikes.

Straws are no longer offered at the local club, and when Western Australia banned plastic bags in 2018, the two small island supermarkets followed suit and now offered distinctive handmade boomerang bags instead.

And although the nearest recycling plant is 2,000 kilometres and an expensive container ship journey away, the shire has issued each household two recycling bins so waste can be sorted at the source.

The bins' contents are kept separate and taken to the West Island transfer station.

And while some household waste still had to be incinerated (there is no landfill on the islands), Mr Minkom said the amount was "not nearly as much as what it used to be".

Glass is fed into a machine where it is crushed into material that can be used for road base on the islands.

"We were getting a big stockpile of glass up until the introduction of this machine," Ian Evans, the shire's manager of work and services, said.

"And it's going back to good use. This machine is operating every two weeks and we probably get a cubic metre of pulverised glass."

Aluminium cans are crushed, baled and stored in a shed at the transfer station; when there is enough to fill a few containers, they will be shipped to Perth.

The bales must be stored inside to avoid contamination — despite being an Australian territory, people and goods coming in and out of the islands must comply with national quarantine standards.

One shipment that had been stored outside made it all the way to Perth, however it was deemed to be contaminated with weeds, sand and dirt and was sent back.

Recycling is an expensive exercise; the shire is left out of pocket for its efforts but it's still the best option to deal with cans.

"On average we are looking at, for a sea container back to Perth, it's going to be about $14,000," Mr Evans said.

"A sea container full of aluminium at the moment, at the aluminium prices, you'd probably get a return of about $5,000."

With the islands' main source of income coming from tourism, shire staff also work hard to keep the main swimming beaches and populated areas free of litter.

"I think a lot of people here take pride in the islands, being such a small island," Mr Evans said.

"Everybody knows everybody. If you see someone just littering, it's not going to go down well with the wider community."

Turning trash into treasure

One long-term resident has taken recycling a step further, repurposing an old wooden barge into an arts centre on West Island.

Emma Washer moved to the Cocos Islands as a child and apart from a few years away at university, majoring in sculpture, she has never left.

"This boat was built by Clunies-Ross on Home Island with a team of men and it was originally used for the ferry, and it was also used to go out to North Keeling to collect the coconuts," she said.

"My dad is into restoring old things as well, so we started the project together in 2001 to restore the boat and turn it into a community arts space."

It took eight years of hard work to complete, but the centre now sells work by local artists and runs workshops that teach people how to make art from objects washed up on the beach.

Beach waste is collected and stacked in neat piles, ready to become sculpture.

"It's pretty horrendous," Ms Washer said of the debris.

"Ever since I have grown up here, it has always been here. It changes over time with what is being produced, but it certainly hasn't lessened."

She said being able to create artwork from the recycled materials and packaging "feels really good", as did inspiring people in her classes to do the same.

"And that gets a new set of people out there collecting and picking stuff up off the breach.

"Hopefully that is doing a small part of saving the beach and the marine life that are heavily affected by it."

'We don't try to hide it'

Maddison James also grew up on West Island and has been observing the rubbish on the beaches for decades.

"I notice lots of rope, sometimes little toy figurines, plastic bags, but more so is the plastic bottles now," she said.

Her parents run the island canoe safari business, taking tourists to uninhabited islands on the southern side of the atoll, where some of the biggest dumps of plastic waste are found.

Rather than trying to hide the problem or steer visitors away from seeing it, the James family uses it as an opportunity for education.

"We just explain how it washed in," Ms James said.

"Recently I took a tour and it was Clean Up Australia Day.

"We took our bags with us and filled them up with rubbish from the beach and brought them back in the canoes; we can take them to the tip from there."

It's an attitude that Dr Lavers applauds.

"I thought that was particularly innovative and brave and certainly the right thing to do," she said.

"The community is dealing with it in the best ways they know how, through education, and I was incredibly impressed by their willingness to invite us as the scientific community and also a huge number of community groups from outside the Cocos."

Cleaning up makes a difference

During the survey, a large group of locals, including primary school students, helped with the clean-up effort.

"Unfortunately the flood of debris is just so significant, that for all of their efforts they cannot keep pace," Dr Lavers said.

"This is where they need help from the outside, and I think they're definitely asking for that."

She added that mainland Australians could not simply blame the problem on careless handling of waste in South-East Asia.

"Australia does not get a free pass. We definitely found Australian brands and companies and products that were very clearly from the mainland and from our day-to-day consumption.

"Once plastic makes its way out into our rivers and is brought into our broader marine waterways, it has no respect for man-made boundaries — what is one person's trash washes up on another person's backyard."

Although the regular clean-ups may seem futile, as the waves wash up more plastic every day, Dr Lavers said they did make a difference.

"Some of the consequences for wildlife and for the habitats are undeniable — we often see things like sea turtles entangled in ghost nets.

"For every big item you can remove from the beach — every bottle, every bucket — you prevent that one large item from fragmenting up into potentially thousands of microplastics ... that is definitely worthwhile."

Credits

Story and photographs: Emma Wynne

Emma Wynne Additional reporting: Isobel Roe

Topics: recycling-and-waste-management, environment, pollution, water-pollution, local-government, community-and-society, academic-research, people, human-interest, cocos-keeling-islands, west-island-cocos-keeling-islands-6799, home-island-cocos-keeling-islands-6799, wa, perth-6000

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