Residents of Mumbai have been cleaning up their beach every week for the past year and vow to carry on until we change our ways with plastic
In October 2015, a young Indian lawyer and his 84-year-old neighbour plunged headfirst into the seemingly impossible task of clearing Mumbai's Versova beach of the tonnes of decomposing waste that had piled up there. One year, 1,500 volunteers and over 3 million kilograms of collected trash later, the Herculean effort is bearing fruit, but more action is needed to prevent waste from entering the ocean.
When 33-year-old Afroz Shah and his octogenerian friend, Harbansh Mathur, first rolled up their sleeves and started shoveling the mounds of trash from Versova, they had no idea they were kicking off the largest beach clean-up in history and a grassroots movement that transcends generational, religious and social divides.
Every weekend since then, hundreds of volunteers – from slum-dwellers to Bollywood stars, from school children to politicians – have been turning up at Versova for what Afroz romantically calls "a date with the ocean", but what in reality means labouring shin-deep in rotting litter under the scorching Indian sun to clean the beach of waste. After each such date, satisfied volunteers take selfies on a clean stretch of sand before heading home to rest.
But inevitably, every weekend trash reclaims the beach, white plastic bags sprouting from the sand, schoolbags and flip-flops bobbing on the tide. Mumbai municipal authorities estimate that the city's residents produce more than to 9,000 tonnes of solid waste per day, some of which ends up in creeks and canals that flush the litter into the Indian Ocean, which then regurgitates it in places like the Versova beach.
Afroz Shah is deservedly proud of the Versova Residents' accomplishments. Not only have they brought the decision-makers' attention to marine litter, they are also starting to win their beach back with decreasing amounts of litter each month. "Last year, when we started, the plastic on the beach was about 5-and-a-half feet high. From shoulder height, we have brought it down to around ankle height now," Afroz said.
But the volunteers are not laying down their shovels, vowing to remain on the beach until people and their governments around the world change their approach to producing, using and discarding plastic and other products that wash on Versova beach.
Joining the clean-up last Sunday, UN Environment head Erik Solheim said: "I think what you are doing is fantastic. You are removing tonnes upon tonnes of plastic from the beaches, but you are also sending a strong signal to political authorities that they should enact policies that reduce the influx of plastic into the oceans."
Each year, people around the world produce nearly 300 million tonnes of plastic and a similar amount of plastic waste. Of that, as much as 13 million tonnes finds its way into our oceans. It is as if we were dumping two garbage trucks of plastic into the ocean every minute. Such amounts of plastic wreak havoc on marine ecosystems, fisheries and on our economies, costing us up to $13 billion per year in environmental damage.
Exposed to the elements, larger plastic items break up into smaller pieces, called microplastics. These have been shown to be carriers for dangerous pathogens, such as bacteria, spreading disease beyond its natural range. Microplastics are also ingested by marine organisms, such as birds, fish or shrimp and ultimately land on our plates, posing a significant health threat.
Even the largest beach clean-ups can only remove a fraction of the plastic that we dump into the ocean. Reducing our production and consumption of this material and improving waste management is the only way of preventing World Economic Forum's grim prediction that by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish swimming in our seas.
In the 1950s we produced around 1.5 million tonnes of plastic each year. If the current trends persist, by 2050 we will be producing 33 billion tonnes – that is around 36 Mount Everests of plastic every year. A large part of that will be single-use plastic – items that we only use for a matter of minutes before discarding them into the environment where they remain for hundreds of years.
Countries around the world fight against this prospect. Just last month France became the first country in the world to ban disposable plastic cups, plates and cutlery. Earlier this year, Tanzania imposed a ban on the use of plastic bags, following in the steps of Rwanda and Malawi. And a recent study showed that the use of single-use plastic bags in England plummeted by over 85 per cent since a charge of 5 pence per bag had been introduced last year.
This wave of change cannot roll fast enough for the residents of Versova who are bracing themselves for many more weeks of pushing back the plastic tide, which washes up on their beach every day. They vow to turn up for their weekly dates with the ocean, shovels in rubber glove‑clad hands, until people everywhere clean up their act.
