We were dismayed to find plastic choking our recovering coral. A coral suffocated by plastic looks like bleached coral. Plastics also degenerate - thin films, plastic bits and microplastics that get eaten by fish or birds, killing them and entering our food chain.
Year after year, dive after dive. Despite best efforts to pick plastic off the coral, it was an unending tide of plastic.
To address this problem underwater, we decided to tackle it holistically from the land.
Sea Communities rallied the community. We door-knocked to explain to the village households that we wanted to start collecting plastic. We weighed the hard and soft plastics of each household for weeks.
Our volunteers made art sculptures out of plastics to increase awaress.
Finally, we hit the jackpot. We met a passionate inventor of a small scale recycling machine, Louise Hardman of The Plastic Collective. Louise is incredible. She not only invented a machine, the Shruder (shredder/extruder), that can change communities, she is a fantastic educator of schools and a consummate networker of big corporates, who are pursuaded to support her cause with generous sponsorship. We thank Louise for bringing her Shruder to us at Les village. We hope to welcome the Shruder by the beginning of 2019.
Volunteers can participate in Bali's pilot rural plastic recycling scheme. Have you ever wondered how plastic is recycled? Now you can actually do it! You can join us in the entire chain of collecting household plastics, administer the weighing and plastic banking scheme, sort, process and shred plastic, then extrude it into monofilament or weave that can be turned into new products. You can learn to craft yourself a new bag, bowl or toy out of recycled plastic. Best of all, you will take home a valuable lesson that we cannot solve the world's plastic waste problem by recycling alone. REDUCE and RE-USE is much easier!