Transcript
KELVIN PASSFIELD: It's heartening. It's good to hear that it's started but it's a huge task to start stopping the increase - reversing the trend of rubbish and plastic getting into our oceans and then trying to bring it back to zero and then also the amount of plastic that is already in the ocean - with those five big gyres of plastics floating around - how is that going to impact the ocean in the long-term even if we stop putting more plastic in now?
AMELIA LANGFORD: Indeed, it's already at a very - would you say - pretty desperate place?
KP: Yeah, I'd say so. Just about every fish that you open, if you look at the gut contents, there will be some sort of plastic in there. Every seabird that you find dead on some of these seabird breeding islands, like our own Suwarro up in the north, you'll find their guts are full of plastic that they think is food and they try and eat it or bring it back to feed to their babies.
AL: So obviously the UN has made this announcement but there are grass-roots organisations in the Pacific already working to reduce the use of plastic. What are you guys doing?
KP: Well our main activity at the moment in relation to plastic is actually trying to stop the use of polystyrene, styrafome, that is used mainly in food packaging here. Food is a very important activity up here and a lot of people eat out, a lot of people go to markets, and they'll get their food in polystyrene takeaway containers. We've had a big campaign trying to change that mentality - for the vendors to start using bio-degradable packaging based on cane sugar or potato starch and those kind of things - that do break down in the landfills.
AL: And I suppose because of the Cook Islands tourist industry, does that create a lot of excess plastic as well?
KP: It does, yeah. And the thing is a lot of tourists actually bring their own food with them when they come. They'll bring polystyrene chilli bins of food all wrapped up in plastics and that. We would much rather that they just buy the local food. The prices up here are not that bad. I know people have this idea that things are really expensive up here. A lot of the imported things are. But still there's the foods and the meats and the chicken and other things, and the fresh vegetable and that, that people have here. So I would be encouraging tourists to just eat locally and reduce rubbish that way. And I think the other area where you get a lot of plastics and rubbish going into the ocean is all the foreign fishing fleets that are fishing in the pacific. We've got maybe 40 or 50 odd foreign longliners and perhaps 10 to 30 purse seiners fishing in our ocean. I'd like to know what is all there rubbish. They're not supposed to throw it over board, it's illegal but they're out at sea for so long. I'm sure they're not keeping it all on board. So I think that we need to do a lot more at controlling that plastic pollution from the fishing boats.
AL: As you mentioned, it is a huge task to tackle ocean pollution. As a small grassroots organisation, do you sometimes feel a little bit disillusioned by how tremendous this task really is?
KP: Yeah, I'd say we do definitely. We do wonder how much we can do which is really going to make a difference. But someone's gotta do something. So we keep going, we support government. We encourage government to ban polystyrene. For example, we've been talking to the government about banning polystyrene but it takes a bit of work to get the paperwork done and legislation doesn't seem to be a top priority for them at the moment. But we'll keep pushing them for the bans on polystyrene and other harmful things.
AL: So this global campaign by the United Nations environment branch, would you encourage the Cook Islands to join that campaign and other Pacific nations?
KP: Definitely, yeah. By all means, the more that people get behind it the more pressure that we can put on the bigger countries, the bigger polluters or the countries that are producing the plastics to start producing plastics which are more environmentally friendly, I think would be really good. I think everybody needs to get behind it and support it and just hope that it hasn't gone past the threshold, the tipping point. That's the problem with the way we're treating the world. If we push it to far it's going to just tip over that point where it can't bounce back.
AL: So how optimistic are you that this global campaign might be able to help?
KP: Moderately optimistic I guess. I think the world has to realising - they have to start waking up to what we're doing to it and I don't think they can turn a blind eye to it much longer. So I think yeah...some people are only interested in short term gains, making profits. But there's a growing body of people who are worried about the future so we just hope that they are the people who are in control of making the decisions.
