Sunset at Boracay

The Philippine authorities have completely closed the vacation island of Boracay, its #1 sun and fun destination for both foreign and domestic tourists, for the next 6 months. They are calling the island a cesspool. Literally.

It takes a serious “state of calamity” to turn away the kind of money the island brings in. Over $US 1 billion, 20% of the country’s tourism revenue, is generated by some 2 million tourists visiting this tiny island every year. And that is exactly the problem.

This popularity, combined with overdevelopment and inadequate infrastructure, has destroyed the very things that attracted all those people in the first place. Businesses have been dumping sewage and trash directly into the ocean and thousands of what they call “illegal structures”, squatters’ shacks without facilities, have been built along streams and outlets draining directly to the oceans. The island is trashed, the environment destroyed, those crystal clear oceans on white sandy shores are filled with litter and human waste.

During the time of closure they will get started on fixing what has become a totally inadequate infrastructure for sewage treatment, garbage, and roads systems although fixing what’s wrong with it will take much longer than that.

I never visited Boracay when we lived in the Philippines as the crowds never appealed to me, but I did have occasion to witness (and touch) first hand an ocean beach destroyed. It was on the final morning of a weekend stay at a beach in southern Luzon, a few hours’ drive from our home in Manila. I went out for a final snorkel and was hovering above the nearby reef off the beach when I became aware of a sensation of something getting caught between my outstretched fingers and gliding along my bare arms. My first thought was that it felt like seaweed or kelp or something like that but when I raised my eyes to look I saw that it was garbage! Wrappers and plastic bags, juice boxes and plastic water bottles and who knows what else – it was so thick and plentiful that it seemed like a garbage truck just around the edge of the cove had dumped its contents into the ocean leaving the tides and currents to bring it our way. But that would be mad. It would assume the town had a garbage truck.

So last month the government shut the entire island of Boracay down as they do whatever they’re going to do. They are sending in 600 police officers including a riot squad to patrol the beaches presumably to make sure no one sneaks on to them. Although another way of looking at the police presence is that a lot of people are at odds with the government’s decision to close the island including local business owners and the 17,000 people who earn their livelihoods in the tourist industry and are now out of work.

Long Beach, Tofino, west coast of Vancouver Island

Of course the Philippines is not the only one with problems. The entire planet is affected by human trash. On our recent trip to the west coast of Vancouver Island we noticed garbage collection zones at the pathways to the beaches where people can deposit stuff they’ve picked up on their walks as well as, I suppose, from larger more organized volunteer cleanups. Most of it is consumer plastic and fishing equipment and the Tofino area still picks up identifiable debris from the Japanese tsunami of 2011. You could see a lot of fishing lines, nets and ropes, that is particularly problematic for wildlife. We did pick up large pieces of plastic that had rolled onto the beach with the tide but what was also disturbing is, if you look closely at the sand, there are a lot of really small pieces of plastic as well. All of this is really having an impact on ocean wildlife. Recently a sperm whale dead on a Mediterranean beach in Spain was found to have ingested 64 kilos of plastic. I’ve personally witnessed sea lions with plastic ropes circling their necks, cutting into their flesh, just up the coast from where we live and every year marine biologists from the Vancouver Aquarium come over to help rescue the animals from their entanglements.

The thing about all this plastic we use and throw away is that it will never degrade, it’s to be found on land everywhere and a lot of it ends up in the oceans. Even at the deepest part of the ocean, 36,000 feet deep in the Mariana Trench, researchers have found images of plastic bags among other trash. Meanwhile China announced earlier this year that they will no longer accept recycled plastic waste from the rest of the world which has caused some countries to get in to a tizzy, as they scramble to figure out what to do with it all. No more shipping your garbage out of sight out of mind to some faraway country, pretending the problem is not a global one. Previously “recycled” plastic is now piling up and, without a place to put it, is ending up once again in landfills.

A woman sits with her baby in a sea of plastic in Laizhou, China, where she works on ripping the labels off the bottles. Photo: Peter Ford/The Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images

But even that recycling blue box is not good enough when trying to get a handle on all that plastic waste. A guy in England last year collected every piece of plastic he used for an entire year and created an installation displaying it all. An impressive and sobering visual of our “normal” plastic consumption. But here’s the thing. Of the 4,490 separate plastic items he collected, only 56 were actually totally recyclable. (See treehugger.com/plastic/what-years-worth-plastic-looks for the story). Often as individuals we may think we’re doing something good by recycling plastic but the fact is a lot of it never gets recycled. The only answer is to not use it in the first place, and given the overpackaging that prevails in our society, that is not easy to do.

Daniel Webb’s year’s collection of his plastic use. Photo: Ollie Harrop

This dead albatross chick was found with plastics in its stomach on Midway Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Photo: Dan Clark,, USFWS/AP

Closer to home, the city of Vancouver throws 2 million plastic bags away into the trash every week and is intending to ban plastic straws, which has the bubble tea shops protesting the move. Other municipalities all over are starting to ban single use plastics, or at least starting to talk about it. The city of Victoria recently announced a plastic bag ban to start July 1, but that is being challenged in court by – yes – the Canadian Plastic Bag Association. Of course it is. The scope of the problem can be overwhelming and it’s easy to feel small and powerless, but in the end, it’s choices that got us here and choices are all we, as individuals, have. I’m trying to be consistent in remembering to bring reusable bags into the stores when I’m shopping which I guess is the very least I can do. Just say no to plastic bags. Anything to feel good for a couple of seconds that serves as distraction from obsessing over how the oceans and indeed this Earth are going to hell.

My perch at the place we stay at in Ucuelet on the west coast

Right. Just what the ocean needs. More human trash.