Bali beaches vanishing under TONNES of plastic rubbish
- Published
When you go on holiday, the last thing you want to do is sunbathe next to a massive pile of plastic rubbish. But that is exactly what tourists visiting beaches like Kuna beach on the island of Bali are having to do. Pictures, like this one taken at Kuna beach, show the enormous problem that the island has with plastic waste.
Bali is an island in Indonesia, in south-east Asia. It is really popular with tourists who like to go on holiday there to visit its beautiful beaches. But it is becoming more and more covered with rubbish. Just last month, officials there declared a “garbage emergency” across 3.7 miles of the island’s beaches, which included Kuta beach. 700 cleaners and 35 trucks worked to get rid of about 100 tonnes of rubbish every single day, like the person in this picture is doing.
The rubbish is really off-putting for tourists. One holiday-goer from Austria called Vanessa Moonshine said: “When I want to swim, it is not really nice. I see a lot of garbage here every day, every time. It's always coming from the ocean. It's really horrible.” In this picture, we can see a tourist walking past the piles of rubbish on the beach.
Tourism brings a lot of money to Bali, so if people decide they don’t want to go on holiday there anymore, this is a problem for Indonesia because it means that the area will get less money.
Rubbish in the water is also a huge environmental problem. It blocks up waterways in cities, which can increase the risk of flooding. It is also bad for any animals that live in or around water, as they can eat the plastic by mistake or get tangled up in the rubbish.
I Gede Hendrawan, an expert from Udayana University on the island, explained that rubbish isn’t very nice for tourists to have to look at, but said the “plastic waste issue is way more serious. Microplastics can contaminate fish which, if eaten by humans, could cause health problems, including cancer."
Indonesia is made up of more than 17,000 islands. The only country that dumps more rubbish into the sea than Indonesia is China. Indonesia has said it aims to reduce marine plastic waste by 70% by 2025, but looking at these pictures, it seems there is a lot more work to be done.
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