«This plastic has been traveling in the ocean for so long, with the sun, the salt, the impacts against the rock, that it ends up breaking into very small pieces,” continues Kina. She also finds, stranded between the rocks, tires, buoys, ropes, pieces of buckets, plastic caps, polystyrene boxes… “On each outing, we collect around 20 to 30 kilos of garbage,” explains -she. It was during a workshop on marine conservation, when she was in middle school, that Kina began to become interested in this scourge of plastic. From now on, she goes to the beach every weekend to collect this waste which constantly arrives on the seaside. She then transforms this plastic in her workshop to make small objects such as key rings, candle holders or dominoes, which she sells to tourists. “I still have the feeling that it doesn’t do much good because it’s impossible to collect all the plastic. After spending three or four hours cleaning the beach, there is always some left,” she laments.
At his side, his cousin Maria José Paoa wanders around and returns with her arms full of pieces of plastic and rope. “I feel calmer after cleaning the beach,” she says. But he added: “It’s very impactful to see the amount of waste we collect. It’s desperate sometimes. I spend hours and hours of my life collecting residue that is not mine! At the same time, there are other places in the world where all this doesn’t matter and where we continue to generate more and more waste… Sometimes I start thinking and tell myself that my efforts are insignificant. »
Also read: The collapse of Easter Island civilization, a collapsing myth
Plastic in the stomach
In the waters surrounding the island, there are more than a million microplastics per square kilometer. Almost all native fish would also be contaminated by microplastic, or by invisible nanoparticles present in their body. Carlos attests, he is a fisherman and has just moored his motor boat in the small port of Hanga Roa. While emptying the ten tuna he has just caught, he says: “My parents and my grandparents did not find plastic in the fish, unlike me today. Sometimes I open the fish and there are some in their stomachs. Turtles can also be trapped, so we must intervene to free them.” According to him, much of the waste that reaches Rapa Nui comes from industrial fishing boats, which are present in large quantities in international waters around the island.
This is also what Nancy Rivera thinks, she coordinates the marine investigation unit within the town hall of Rapa Nui. She estimates that at least 50 to 60% of the objects that end up on beaches correspond to fishing equipment. His colleague, Emilia Palma Tuki, a marine biologist, confirms: “We found a buoy with numbers written on it, like a sort of license plate. After some research, it turned out that these numbers corresponded to a Chinese boat with quotas available to fish.
Japanese, Australian and even European boats are also found in the area. Pamela Averill, an oceanographic engineer, remembers identifying the origin of boxes of fish thanks to the inscriptions on their packaging: “Many indicated Spain.” She also specifies that part of the plastic deposited by the waves on the coasts of the island comes from the South American continent, from Peru and Chile in particular, more than 3,500 kilometers away. Even if it is difficult to establish the origin of all these plastics due to their degradation at sea, one thing remains certain, “over the last fifteen years, there has been an exponential increase in waste in Rapa Nui”, maintains Pedro Lazo Hucke, park ranger on the island. He points the finger at the responsibility of the countries producing this waste and considers that it is up to them to establish recycling systems, or even to stop the production of plastic altogether.
Also read: The Sea of Plastic in the Pacific becomes a haven for invasive species
Cleaning sessions
Regularly, the Rapa Nui town hall, helped by residents, organizes coastal cleanups in order to recover the waste that accumulates on the beaches. They are then taken to the Orito recycling center where they are piled up in large bags. “We have no other place to put them,” regrets Alexandra Tuki, who has managed the center for more than twenty years. They stay here until we find staff to sort them. It’s already better that they are there rather than on the seaside.” At the entrance to Orito, stray dogs, lying on the ground, avoid the comings and goings of trucks which unload kilos of plastic bottles, aluminum cans and other boxes near the shed under which is located a large compressor machine… The recycling center primarily deals with domestic waste produced on the island by the approximately 8,000 inhabitants but also by the very numerous tourists.
The thirty employees manage to recycle a little more than 5% of the island’s waste. «It pains me and it annoys me to see so much waste, says Alexandra. When I was born, there weren’t that many. Unfortunately, today we have a very consumerist mentality.” And also an economy entirely focused on tourism. The island receives more than 70,000 visitors each year, this is less than before the pandemic but it is twice as many as 10 years ago. At the same time, waste production in Rapa Nui has seen an increasing trend. Every week, the Orito center still manages to send ten tonnes of sorted waste back to the mainland thanks to an agreement with the only airline that operates on the island.
Alexandra would like to be able to do more but she lacks financial, material and human resources. The 95% of waste that cannot be recycled ends up in the municipal landfill, which will soon be saturated, and above which birds of prey hover in search of food. Tons of garbage accumulate in the open air with the intense blue of the Pacific Ocean in the background. Alexandra shows a polystyrene box abandoned among the trash: “These boxes arrive by plane and contain fruits, vegetables and frozen meat,” she explains. It’s cheaper for tourist establishments to buy their products on the continent rather than from local producers.”
Easter Island, however, has the ambition to become a “zero waste” territory by 2030. The town hall is putting in place measures to help the tourism sector in particular reduce its waste. Part of the Rapa Nui population has also gotten into the habit of recycling their trash. But faced with the continued influx of plastic by the sea and the continued production of domestic waste, this objective seems difficult to achieve for the moment.
Also read: Easter Island, an enigma at the end of the world
