Waste travels to the islands
Leony Aurora, The Jakarta Post/Jakarta
"It's a Nike! A doll! Thongs! Light bulbs!"
These words did not come from excited children at a birthday party. Instead, they came from volunteers, who were quite surprised at what they found over the weekend on the west beach of Kotok island in Kepulauan Seribu (Thousand Islands) regency.
Kotok island, with its relatively intact coral reef, is a favorite getaway for Jakarta divers. Some 60 Indonesian and foreign divers mixed work with pleasure -- cleaning the reef of garbage while observing the marine life -- on the International Coastal Cleanup Day (ICC) 2004.
The annual event has been organized for the sixth time by Bubbles Dive Center, whose head office is in Cilandak, South Jakarta. This year's theme is "Protect our local dive site".
"We didn't find anything except one fish hook," said Feisal, a diver whose group had been cleaning the reef surrounding the resort island. Groups coming from inhabited Pramuka island, however, returned with armloads of marine debris, proving that marine pollution can be traced back to one single source: people.
The divers collected a total of 241 items, with almost half of them been made up of beverage cans, plastic glasses and bottles. The rest included food wrappers, fishing nets, rope and plastic sheeting.
The rubbish collectors who remained on land on Kotok island found plenty to do.
"Well, I've learned that Chiki is the favorite snack around here," said a participant, Astrid Tika, with a wide grin. Some 761 food wrappers -- including plastic bags and snack wrappers -- 152 single sandals and shoes, 198 beverage containers and 32 light bulbs were picked up during the 90-minute cleanup.
The resort island's west beach might not be inhabited but that does not change the amount of garbage being washed up there. Rubbish from the capital somehow always manages to travel the 55.5 kilometers to reach the white sand beach.
"It would be easy to stop the pollution in the islands," said Daniel "Abi" Abimanju Carnadie, manager of Bubbles. "Shut down Jakarta."
Simple things can prove to be dangerous for creatures of the sea. Highly buoyant plastic bags do not only not decompose easily but can also be easily mistaken for jelly fish, the favorite food of sea turtles. Discarded ropes and fishing nets can entangle fish, sea mammals and sea birds.
Traces of tar were also seen on several plastic bags on the beach. "This shows oil pollution, either from an oil rig or a ship," said Abi.
Bubbles will send a report on the cleanup to the headquarters of Ocean Conservancy, which initiated the ICC in 1986, in Washington. Last year, the organization managed to get 450,000 people from 90 countries to participate and collected 3.43 million kilograms of marine debris.
"Maybe it's a small act, but we hope that it will have a domino effect everywhere," said Abi.
The snowball effect is already apparent from the number of people expressing interest in the program. "More than 100 divers wanted to come, but we did not have the capacity," said Andreas Tika of Bubbles.
Aside from collecting garbage, the diving center also released 60 two-month-old sea turtles and 11 two-year-old ones, which were bred in the country's national park.
The participants sank an old bus, which had all its paint and mechanical parts removed, to encourage the growth of a new reef.
"Hopefully the fish will use it as their home, and divers will get an interesting site to visit," said Abi.