Beach Bunch collected over 730kg of general waste, 140kg of plastic and 2kg of aluminium cans in two hours.

The Beach Bunch, an environmental-based society, has so far helped to collect over 330kg of plastic bottles at several beaches in the country. Their latest cleaning campaign was at the Jerudong beach. The whole campaign spanned a total duration of 12 hours and involved about 310 volunteers.
One empty 1.5L plastic bottle weighs approximately 0.04kg, the Beach Bunch said. During the cleanup, a total of 8,300 bottles were collected.

Brunei has a coastline of 161km. Therefore, they can collect about 16,000kg of plastic bottles, i.e. 400,000 plastic bottles.

On the whole, based on their record, the Beach Bunch has helped to pick up some 1.4 tonnes where 1.07 tonnes are general waste including plastic bags and glasses and 0.33 tonnes or 330kg of plastic bottles.

On the world scale, the Beach Bunch told the Sunday Bulletin that the largest identified plastic garbage was not on the land but on the sea. It’s known as the Pacific Gyre or the Great Garbage Patch. For more information, check out www.greatgarbagepatch.org.

The Secretary of Beach Bunch, Rizan, said this is plastic bottles alone. He said plastic bags are difficult to collect; they usually end up in the sea. But they have collected mostly plastic bottles, all kind of bottles including detergents.

Marine scientists stated that plastic waste in the oceans poses a potentially devastating long-term toxic threat to the food chain.

According to JASTRE official, Hj Mohd Noor bin Hj Mohd Salleh, plastics are not easily decomposed, some taking even a thousand years, leaving potentially toxic substances. Plastic waste will usually become toxic to the soil and this will in turn affect the food chain.

Therefore, according to him, plastic will never be safe for humans. The only way to make it safe is to recycle it and to reduce its usage. There are biodegradable plastics, which have environmentally friendly composition.

The Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Development (Administration & Finance), Hj Mohd Rozan bin Dato Paduka Hj Md Yunos, said the ministry is advocating against the use of plastics by proposing shopping outlets in the country to charge customers for every plastic use, while promoting the use of reusable shopping bags.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Development is organising a ‘No Plastic Day’ on May 3 asking shops in the country to participate in the cause.

Beach Bunch is a non-government organisation (NGO), which was formerly known as Brunei Beach Bums. It was established last year with a mission to protect the beaches of Brunei from pollution and has embarked on a series of cleaning campaigns around the beaches in Brunei. They have long-term goals in the pipeline to potentially involve SMEs, government agencies and the UN. It’s called the Blue Flag, an eco-label for beaches and runs under the Foundation for Environment Education (FEE), a NGO with members in 49 countries as of June 2007.

Blue Flag’s partners are EU, UNEP and WTO. According to the Beach Bunch, the flag is given to beaches that meet a specific set of criteria concerning environmental information and education, water quality, safety and services and environmental management. It is designed to raise environmental awareness and increase good environmental practices among tourists and local populations as well as beach and marina management and staff.

The programme criteria are also designed to work with the national, regional and local legislation of each country, thereby assuring that the legislation is being followed. It can also be used to set a benchmark higher than what already exists.

As of 2007 there were over 3,200 sites awarded with the Blue Flag in 37 countries including countries in Europe, in the Caribbean, Morocco, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. More information is available at www.blueflag.org.

Meanwhile, Rizan said there are still more that can be done to improve some of the beaches in Brunei in term of waste disposal facility.

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