By Amber Platowski
Pom Pom Island is a remote uninhabited island in the Celebes Sea off the coast of Malaysian Borneo. Every day marine litter filled with plastics smothers the shoreline. This story investigates a breakdown of what is washing up and where in the world it may be coming from. As the coordinator of the study, I delve into how it affected me personally and how other volunteers have made changes in their lives based on the experience of dealing with the daily beach cleanups.
A BEACH IN DESPAIR
Jumping off the boat into the pristine turquoise waters was as symbolic as it was literal. I had arrived at the Tropical Research and Conservation Centre (TRACC) on Pom Pom Island off the coast of Malaysian Borneo. I was diving into an immersive voluntourism program that included coral restoration and other ocean conservation-based projects. As we had our tour of the property, the manager told us about our chores each day: washing dishes, crushing cans, and daily beach cleanups. At first, I didn’t think much of it until it was my turn to do the beach clean. The shore of the beach that was perfectly clean the prior day when I arrived was absolutely covered in marine litter. We walked along the shoreline picking up all the plastic and debris we could find and putting them in shrimp bags that would be taken back to the port town of Semporna, the gateway to many of the top dive destinations in the world.
WHERE WAS IT COMING FROM?
With as much debris as we were picking up every day, the employees and volunteers seemed to have different ideas as to the cause of the massive scale of trash. Some thought it was coming from the town of Semporna, the closest port town, a 45-minute boat ride away. Some blamed the nearby stateless Bajau Laut community. Others yet suggested tourism. In order to find the cause of this pollution, I created a community-based science project and recruited volunteers. Together, we tracked the abundance and composition of marine debris during daily beach cleans. We discovered that food wrappers were the number one item found during the study.
old television 
art installation
BACKGROUND ON THE AREA
The primary industries in this area of the Coral Triangle are dive tourism and fisheries1. An impact assessment of international tourist arrivals was completed with the daily mass of marine litter collected, and although no statistically significant results were found between the two, there is evidence that tourists will avoid areas with prevalent plastic pollution 2,3. Could it be that the marine debris issue is bigger than international tourism? I was successful in determining the direction the debris was coming from. During the Southwest Monsoon season, there was significantly more debris washing up on Pom Pom Island than during the Northeast and Intermonsoon seasons. Pom Pom Island is southwest of Semporna, the stopping point for tourists before boarding vessels heading popular diving and snorkelling sites like Sipadan. Was it the locals in Semporna? Domestic tourism? Lack of municipal waste management? There were still a lot of questions to be answered, but it was time to bring the energy to my own community.
ACTION SHOULD FOLLOW INQUIRY
I returned home feeling confused and motivated. It was empowering to know that 429 other international and domestic volunteers worked on the cleanups over the 26-month study, and the staff at TRACC kept in touch so I could continue to track the data. They too would go home to their own communities and surely have an impact. A community doesn’t have to be local people, it can be like-minded individuals working towards a common cause. I wanted to pass along what I learned in my global community to my local one. I started a marine science club at the school where I teach marine and environmental science. We participated in International Coastal Cleanup Day by the Ocean Conservancy and tracked the items collected, using a similar protocol as we did on Pom Pom Island. Is it a coincidence that our number one item found was food wrappers? Apparently not, since the Ocean Conservancy reported that for the first time, food wrappers overtook cigarette butts as the number one most collected item2. Single-serve packaging is not new, but the repercussions of this convenience item are finally starting to wash up on our shores. Our marine science club decided to do an art installation project to raise awareness about the abundance of plastic in our oceans. They used old CDs to write facts about marine debris and hung them in between used plastic water bottles. We went on the morning announcements and shared some of these facts and started a campaign to collect unrecyclable plastic bottle caps for future art installation projects.
CONCLUSION
I am one of 430 volunteers that spent time on Pom Pom Island between July 2018 and September 2020, picking up trash, tracking it, and weighing it. Everything turned up from dirty diapers to old shoes and toys and we even found a huge TV one day.
There are 429 other individuals making changes in their own communities across the world from Malaysia to the Netherlands and everywhere in between. One of the original volunteers on the project, Sian Tolba, of Wales said in an interview that her participation in the beach cleanups on Pom Pom island made her “adamant that we weren’t going to use one-use nappies. We invested in reusable ones early on and only used disposables when travelling or emergencies”. Single-use diapers were one of the most disgusting items we found nearly every single day. Shima Udin Maluto of Malaysia is a former intern at TRACC and was responsible for tallying data and sending it to me for several months. She said “back at home, I and my mom always go weekend hiking where I’ll bring a shrimp bag with me, and on our way down we’ll collect the trash. All of this is because I was always in charge of writing the data and the numbers do hit hard”. Many former volunteers talk about personal consumer changes that they’ve made to reduce plastics in their own lives. Consumer power is a great way to put our money where our values are. The plastics on Pom Pom aren’t likely to stop accumulating, but our collective actions and understanding will hopefully help us bring change in the future.
Amber Platowski works as a science teacher at Booker High School in Sarasota, FL. She completed this project as a part of her graduate work with Project Dragonfly at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
Works Cited:
- Prabhakaran, S., Vikneswaran, N., & Sridar, R. (2016). Community participation in mitigating marine waste to reduce climatic change in tourism destinations. Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes. 8. 569-577. 10.1108/WHATT-06-2016-0035.
- Buckingham, J., Capper, A., & Bell, M. (2020). The missing sink—Quantification, categorisation and sourcing of beached macro-debris in the Scottish Orkney Islands. Marine Pollution Bulletin, 157, 111364.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2020.111364
- Napper, I. E., & Thompson, R. C. (2020). Plastic Debris in the Marine Environment: History and Future Challenges. Global Challenges, 4(6), 1900081. https://doi.org/10.1002/gch2.201900081
- Cleanup Reports. (2020, April 11). Ocean Conservancy. https://oceanconservancy.org/trash-free-seas/international-coastal-cleanup/annual-data-release/
This piece was prepared online by Panuruji Kenta, Publisher, SEVENSEAS Media