Millions Of Dollars To Clean Up Tuna Nets And Flip Following a five-week clean-up on Aldabra Atoll, one of Seychelles’ UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Millions Of Dollars To Clean Up Tuna Nets And Flip Following a five-week clean-up on Aldabra Atoll, one of Seychelles’ UNESCO World Heritage Site, where 25 tonnes of marine plastic litter was removed, researchers at Oxford University have estimated that the cost to clean up the entire island is approximately $4.68 million, requiring 18,000 person‐hours of labour. This is the largest accumulation of plastic waste reported for any single island in the world.Flops From Island State
The projected costs and recommendations are published today in Nature Scientific Reports and it is the first time that the financial cost for removing the waste has been calculated.
Small island developing states receive unprecedented amounts of the world’s plastic waste. In March 2019, a team from the University of Oxford and Seychelles Islands Foundation, a public trust which manages Aldabra, removed 5% of litter washed up on Aldabra’s shores in a five-week mission. The researchers now estimate that 513 tonnes remain on the island, dominated by waste from regional fishing - buoys, ropes, nets - and 360,000 individual flipflops.
Removing the plastic waste equates to $10,000 per day of clean‐up operations or $8,900 per tonne of litter —well beyond the capacity of non-profit organisations like the Seychelles Islands
Continue reading at University of Oxford.
Image via University of Oxford.
