https://www.ft.com/content/be07595a-2fda-4a2b-9ef8-c320112b6d3c
"A rainbow of plastic bags tangled in the roots of a mangrove tree. Beaches
littered with a confetti of instant-coffee sachets and IndoMie noodle wrappers.
Everywhere, the crunch of discarded plastic cups half-embedded in the sand. For
Kelly Bencheghib and her brothers Gary and Sam, often found knee-deep in
garbage-clogged rivers, a typical day on Bali looks a lot different to what
most visitors see through their Eat, Pray, Love-tinted glasses.
The Paris-born siblings are part of a wave of designers, artists and
environmental advocates turning Bali’s copious rubbish into upcycled treasures.
Growing up in Bali in the early 2000s, the siblings watched the beach
playground near their home in south Bali’s Batu Belig district get filthier
with every monsoon season. “So we decided to do something about it,” says
Bencheghib. They drummed up friends and local schools for occasional beach
clean-ups. “But once we had cleaned an area it would be covered in trash again
the next day.” A search for the source led them to Bali’s plastic-choked
waterways, the result of the island’s woefully inadequate waste-management
infrastructure.
After seven years spent living abroad, Bencheghib returned to Bali to help her
brothers grow their former after-school activity into a fully fledged
non-profit, Make A Change World. She then co-founded with them Sungai Watch
(sungai means “river” in Bahasa Indonesia) – which organises community
clean-ups of the island’s rivers and has installed floating trash barriers to
prevent waste from reaching the ocean. Some of the group’s events attracted
more than 300 volunteers, while social media posts documenting the process have
racked up millions of views. “Stranded in lockdowns, a lot of people around the
world realised how important it is to cherish your environment,” Bencheghib
says.
A grant from the WWF in 2020 helped to kick off its growth to five outposts
around the island, where so far more than 950,000 kilos of waste have been
sorted, indexed and, when possible, upcycled in-house or shipped off to
processing facilities in Java."
Via
The Fixer March 8, 2023:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/un-agreement-protect-oceans-international-waters/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
