During my time as a traveler I noticed a very BIG problem that was getting worse year by year. It's a hot topic now and there is alot of work going into cleaning up the oceans. In the UK there are plastic free zones and we are thankful here in Europe to have recycling, but still reducing and reusing plastic is a better scenario.
But what about places that don't have a fully function rubbish and recycling procedure?
Small islands like Lombok are really struggling, wherever there are humans, and not just local people but also tourists there is a heap of plastic. It's one thing when you stay in a hotel and someone takes the garbage away, you don't think about where it goes.... how would it make you feel if you knew it was going to be thrown into a field?
My personal experience of dealing with my own trash whilst traveling:
I was staying in a house in my friend Adi's village in north Lombok with my partner and we were using plastic bottle for drinking water. We had some beans and pulses that were wrapped in plastic. Every shop we would visit immediately bagged our stuff in plastic bags and we would have to say 'no plastic'. We ended up buying a few things that were wrapped in plastic, like some sheets, a fan and some other random bits, suddenly the house had a pile up of plastic wrappers from all this stuff and there was nowhere to put it, no recycling bin, no rubbish collection, it would just get dumped somewhere. I started to feel really sad, looking at plastic piles everywhere, every little store having convenience & junk foods wrapped in plastic. Sweeties were individually wrapped and I would watch kids eat these treats and throw the wrapper down anywhere.
The worst part is the majority of the plastic waste gets dumped in the streams, as you can see from the pictures both streams are dry right now but when the rainy season comes the water will wash the plastic into the sea. Plastic never degrades, it slowly breaks down into pieces and into very thin bits, it turn into particles eventually but it will still say in the seas and pollute the marine life unless the plastic gets picked up or washed up again. At the moment many people have no idea why plastic is a pollutant, a generation before many people just dumped their waste products because they were organic and there was no issue. People still don't know that the plastic doesn't break down, and if they do know at the moment they feel helpless.
There is a recycling programme for plastic bottles where people recive money to hand them in but all the loose plastic wrappers have no current solution.
I started to research what could be done: I emailed some other initiatives to find out the possibility of starting a real plastic collection on the island, but I received so many dead ends when it came to trying to implement something in Lombok because of the fact it's a small island.
So I kept researching and when I came across:
the eco brick felt like this would be a good way to get started.
The eco brick is a plastic bottle filled with tightly compacted plastic: the result is a strong enough 'brick' to use for building furniture or even a simple structure.
Right now we have started this initiative in the village where we stayed, Adi our friend is leading the project. After some consideration we decided that it was necessary to give a contribution of 30 cent for each bottle handed in, as there is already a recycling initiative that gives money for empty plastic. The procedure to tightly compact the bottles is time consuming so it's important to keep the children motivated.
Our vision is to build a structure out of eco-bricks and make this into an education center. Once people see the visible benefits of the initiative we are hoping that it will spread and that people will be willing to do it freely once they can see the possibility of being able to build a low cost structure.
We need help to keep this project alive and to expand it further: please visit my fundition appeal to raise funds for the Lombok Earthquake Disaster and to continue working on Sustainability projects with Anyar Village.
Here are some visual examples of what can be done with eco bricks:
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