Plastic, Used Diapers, Rotting Food, Dead Animals - What Balinese Stream-Cleaning Team Faces Every Day

It takes a few minutes to adapt every time. The rubbish that piles up against the plastic barriers across the waterways is not only nice, clean plastic bottles. Mixed into the murky mass is all sorts of waste: nappies, face masks, even electrical goods. “You have perished food, the rest of chicken intestines. Unfortunately, we find a lot of dead animals as well, a lot of diapers. So it’s truly horrible, it really gets your stomach churning as you clean up.” But Kelly Bencheghib does not seem to be seriously put off, because she keeps on doing it.

Every week, the Sungai Watch staff don waders and gloves and plunge into the waterways around the Indonesian island of Bali, where they have strung up their big plastic barriers. Along with volunteers, they work their way through the heaps of waste that has built up against the barriers, stuffing it into rubbish bags and slowly, steadily, clearing the filth. The work is gruelling, and yet there is deep satisfaction, even if just temporarily, in watching the rivers open up again. “You do get used to it, strangely enough. But you always need at least a few minutes to adapt as you go into a river.”

The typical mental image of Bali is of a glorious tropical paradise. In reality, like everywhere in the world, the island has a plastic problem: it produces 1.6m tonnes of waste a year, 303,000 tonnes of it plastic. More than half of this goes uncollected, including 33,000 tonnes that gets into Bali’s waterways. During monsoon season, piles of waste from the neighbouring island of Java bury its coastlines. While data varies, one estimate says 1.3m tonnes of Indonesia’s unmanaged plastic may be polluting the ocean every year. And that is just a small part of the millions of tonnes floating in from elsewhere.

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The barriers are an effective mechanism, according to a 2019 study by the marine pollution researcher Muhammad Reza Cordova at Indonesia’s research agency BRIN. He found, over 13 months, that rivers with floating net booms had between seven and 10 times less debris than those without. Reza and his team recommended that the government install nets at least in the 10 main rivers of Java, Indonesia’s most populous island, but take-up has been slow, despite the government’s target to reduce marine plastic pollution by 70% by 2025. “So instead, we see non-government people taking actions, as we can see in many instances, because people just can’t stand it any more,” he said.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/17/stomach-churning-team-wading-through-nappies-to-clean-up-bali-waterways