Page 24 - Islands Business May-June 2022

Oceans

2022 Our Ocean Conference Opening Reception at the Palau Pacific Resort. (Jesse Alpert / U.S. Department of State)

made up of fishing gear and maritime ropes” and that they They also claim economic incentives are “entirely aligned
can continue to “fish and trap aquatic life, entangling aquatic to encourage poor waste management and ocean dumping,”
megafauna, depleting harvestable fish populations thus saying island nations are essentially subsiding fishing busi-
impacting global food security, causing hazards to navigation, nesses that evade their responsibilities under the Interna-
and acting as a hazard for commercial and non-commercial tional Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships
marine species, and aquatic habitats.” (MARPOL) as a result.
A Forum Fisheries Agency report looking at plastic pollu- An economic incentive to follow MARPOL requirements must
tion from fishing vessels in the western and central Pacific has be created, they conclude. They recommend that wastes from
estimated that “between 241 and 560 tonnes of plastic waste vessels of distant-water fishing nations should not be off-load-
from bait alone is being dumped at sea by longline fishing ves- ed at Pacific Island ports, carrier vessels must accept waste
sels every year.” from fishing vessels, and a waste bond should be introduced,
Further, the authors estimate purse seine vessels dump 77.7 whereby a vessel must show that a reasonable quantity of
tonnes of woven plastic salt bags—or 1,036,000 individual waste is disposed of onshore in an acceptable manner to avoid
bags—into the ocean every year. sanction.
Yet, the FFA report said “the institutional frameworks, Ultimately as Fiji’s Peter Thomson, UN Special Envoy for the
guidance documents, standards and agreements that might Ocean said in the leadup to the impending UN Ocean Confer-
be needed by ship operators to address the issue of onboard ence in Lisbon, we also need to take individual responsibility
waste management are, in fact, already in place.” for the state of the oceans.
The report states that only Fiji has access to a landfill facil- “I think you have to think first about source to sea,” he told
ity that is compliant with standards. “The other four nations UN news recently. “You see people throwing cigarette butts
– the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands into the gutter. They don’t think about the fact that the filter
and Solomon Islands – struggle with their own local waste of that cigarette is microplastic and it’s heading in one direc-
management to varying degrees, and their landfill facilities tion, which is down the drain, into the sea eventually, and
are mostly already overwhelmed. Adding foreign commercial that’s more microplastics going into the ocean.
waste to existing domestic waste is not a viable solution.” “Microplastics, of course, are coming back to them when
Waste management “must become part of the everyday they’re eating their fish and chips because they are being
operation of running a tight ship, and waste needs to be man- absorbed into life in the ocean…So, what can we do? We can
aged and stowed for off-loading at the appropriate place and just adopt better behaviour as human beings in terms of pol-
time. Good ship operators are already doing this… The logisti- lution. Look at your plastic use and say, Do I really need all
cal problems are quite easily solved, and there is no shortage this plastic in my life? I’m old enough to remember a life with
of guidance on how to address them; the major challenge at no plastic, it was very nice.”
present is the indifferent attitudes toward proper waste man-
agement,” the report’s authors, Alice Leney, Francisco Blaha editor@islandsbusiness.com
and Robert Lee state.

24 Islands Business, May-June 2022