We just came across this article describing a trash island in Singapore (their version of Thilafushi, the Maldivian counterpart). Read through this article and marvel at the more environmental way the Singaporeans are disposing of their trash!

I say “more environmental” because I’m referencing to the Maldives’ trash island, Thilafushi. The trash disposal system in the Maldives seems to be about 100 years behind Singapore, if this article that calls Thilafushi a “toxic bomb in the ocean,” is anything to go by.

Thilafushi is basically an island made of trash, built on top of a lagoon. That’s where all the trash from the capital island Male’ and nearby atolls is dumped. There’s no recycling system in the Maldives and all the trash is just put into one big nasty pile (or multiple piles, to be exact).

According to the Blue Peace article, “Thilafushi lagoon fill, with used batteries, asbestos, lead and other potentially hazardous waste mixed with the municipal solid wastes, is an increasingly serious ecological and health problem in the Maldives.”

The problem with Thilafushi, unlike with the Singaporean better-planned counterpart, is that “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.”

So that’s great. Who knows how many toxic chemicals we’ve ingested in the tuna we’ve eaten here for the past three weeks (I don’t even dare to think about the amounts of  toxins the Maldivians have ingested as they have lived here all their lives!).

Another thing about the trash island is that it’s surely a terrible eye sore! We haven’t ventured there ourselves yet (though we hope to do so soon!), but we saw a similarly sad sight in Maafushi, a local island we visited recently.

The “landfill” there was basically one of the beaches. All the abandoned clothes, paintings, food scraps and plastic containers were just lying there, half in the water, half on the island. The trash covered an area about 30 meters long, and three meters wide. Apparently the trash is picked up from there about once a year and taken to Thilafushi.

Yeah, since that’s a much better of a solution.

(One can’t help but wonder how the owner of that bicycle feels about seeing his broken bike just lying there, month after month. Hopefully he would feel guilty and take it back and fix it. Who knows, it was probably not even broken before but just thrown away since the owner bought a motorbike! That wouldn’t surprise us one bit…)