Trip to Thilafushi - Trash Island

I have been out of internet access for the past week visiting Dhuvaafaru island in Raa atoll - an incredible experience which I shall post about shortly. I left on a whim, so was unable to write before I left. Please check out the photo essay accompaniment of this blog post, below!


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR..

A week ago this past Monday I went to the island of Thilafushi.

At night in Villingili, sometimes the smell of burning refuse will drift through the open windows, a stinging, damp, sulphuric smell that lingers for hours at a time. When I learned that the island visible from our apartment balcony was a waste dump for Male, I decided I should visit. Waking early that morning, it seemed the clouds and rain that had haunted Male for the last week had disappeared, and so at 8:30 I was off and across the football grounds to the Villingili ferry terminal to catch the 9:00 ferry from Male.

In 1990 the island of Thilafushi didn’t exist. Then it was the lagoon of Thilafahlu, a sweeping 7 kilometer stretch of aquamarine northwest of Male. On January 7 1992, in an effort to alleviate the growing amount of garbage accumulating in Male, the government began reclamation of the lagoon, and an island was born. Now Thilafushi serves as a waste center - a lagoon-fill - for Male and surrounding islands, including several resorts.

In Dhivehi, the word for beach – gondu dhoh - literally means the place where you dispose of refuse. Especially on the outer islands, early mornings you will often see women approaching the waterside to dispose of last night’s dinner. Dustbins don’t exist here, and it is not uncommon to see ferry passengers toss candy wrappers over the side.

Before,
When populations were small,
when the height of houses never surpassed the tallest palm tree,
when walls and roofs consisted of coconut palm thatch and local wood,
when the trees outnumbered people,
when food came from below and above and not across -
from the sea and the coconut palm,
before the advent modern packaging……
then waste was biodegradable,
washing out to sea with the tide to leave the beaches clean.

But when 130,000 people live stacked on top of each other in little more than a square mile, the delicate balance is ruptured, and sustainability is no longer so simple. The groundwater is not enough to serve such a community. Reefs bleach and die without proper sewage treatment. With the onslaught of cell phones and electronics, plastic wrap, bottled water, Coca Cola, soaring cement apartment blocks, gondu dhoh no longer bears its historical purpose.

I should add that imports are not a new phenomenon in Maldives. Despite romanticized accounts of Maldives, from a trade perspective, Maldives has never been isolated.

“Hakurá handulá telun tásimutta féramun, Béru ne’ nnama libun nete hurihá dati filun,” reads the line of an ancient poem, Etere Vesi from Fua Mulaku, “Our problems are not all solved if we don’t get sugar, rice, oil, pottery and textiles.”

Indeed Maldives has always been a crossroads for trade. Fishermen have long traveled to Colombo and India for spices and rice. Historical accounts have Maldivian sailors sailing as far afield as China and to give homage to the Roman emperor.

Male, historically the trading capitol, is a city of imports. At night, I often find the only way to distinguish the sky from the ocean is the lights of bobbing cargo ships – their sterns bearing name plates from Panama, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Australia Saudi Arabia, China, New York, Japan. Indeed, at first glance it is like any other city – very cosmopolitan, browsing through Male’s shop windows you can find most any product. But overpopulation and the increase of packaged and battery-operated products have led to a dire waste management issue.

What is there to do? While Custom Statistics indicates that scrap metal is the major export from Maldives to India, evacuating all domestic waste would be a logistical and financial nightmare.

A recent blog posting by Bluepeace cited the issue of hazardous waste on Thilafushi. Cast into the piles of refuse, batteries, asbestos and lead intermix with municipal solid wastes to threaten the ecological health of the lagoon as well as the general health of Maldives citizens. There are no recycling facilities to facilitate safe disposal of hazardous wastes in Maldives. Especially during tidal surges, such chemicals leach into the groundwater and surrounding ocean, damaging surrounding sea and reefs.

“The scariest part is that unlike the landfill, in a lagoon fill or sea fill, toxics chemicals can easily seep out into the coastal zone and enter into the lower level in the food web, algae, zooplankton, and fish. Once these toxics chemicals are released it is very difficult to remove them from the food web and can end up on our dinner plate in fish or lobsters.” - Blue Peace

Visiting Thilafushi was a sobering experience.

For me, in many ways I think this lagoon fill is so grotesque because it is so visible and unnatural – out of sync with the ocean-sky equilibrium. Yet a lagoon fill is no different than a landfill, really – the ecological implications are rife in both cases. Perhaps as an island – a reclaimed landscape devoted almost entirely to industry and waste – Thilafushi is more visible, and therefore the issue of waste management more immediate. It is clear that as Maldives moves towards carbon neutrality, the issue of waste management and recycling will be paramount.

Sitting writing this post, several friends are engaged in an animated conversation regarding a beach cleanup plan for Villingili – the last remaining natural beach in the capital. Last week I met with several high school students from an environmental group at CSHE School in Male who are passionate about addressing the waste issue and preparing for the next generation. Admirable and inspiring steps are being taken to address this issue – may such energy see implementation.

Experimenting with different modes of storytelling, I created this photo story to capture my experience. In many ways I feel as though the issue was sorely under-reported on my part - in all this writing I have neglected to mention the Bangladeshi expatriate workers who are sorting the dump on Thilafushi, but I hope this photo essay provides a window into this issue. (Please visit flickr for captions).