We have everything
If you have ever taken part in a beach cleaning, you will agree that the phrase “we have everything, nothing is too strange to be here” applies not only to auction stages, but also to marine debris.
Taiwan is surrounded by ocean, which means that our climate is moderated by monsoons, and marine currents bring migratory fish close to our shores. But the sea also links us to other nations, so that Taiwan is forced to accept an exchange of “gifts” from all over the world—in the form of trash thrown into the sea, known as “marine litter” or “marine debris.”
For this report on marine debris, we took a trip to one of the front lines in the war on ocean trash—the Penghu Islands. There we visited the O2 Lab, which has become famous for turning marine debris into works of art, and we also joined in one of the regularly scheduled beach cleaning activities of O2’s craft team. We could look out over the clear blue sea, but the beach next to it was covered with PET bottles, pieces of plastic, discarded fishing nets, and polystyrene foam. This is something that previously we had only heard about, but on this day were witnessing it first hand. Within an area a mere ten meters square, we cleared away several sackfuls of marine debris, including toothbrushes, syringes, drinking straws, flip-flops, PET bottles, polystyrene, glass bottles, floats, fishing nets, lightbulbs, and toys. During the beach cleaning, participants shared various curious objects they had discovered, including sex toys, ampoules filled with medicines, religious memorial tablets, mahjong tiles, and emergency lighting gear. There are no borders to this debris; all of it is trash from the daily lives of human beings.
But Taiwan’s beaches have not always been this way. Jeng Ming-shiou, a research fellow at the Academia Sinica’s Biodiversity Research Center, is a Penghu native who has been researching the marine ecology and doing scuba diving for more than 40 years. He says that when he was little the white sand beaches of his home island, Baisha, were pristine and beautiful, with a rich variety of marine species. But in the wake of economic development and urban growth, the sea bore the brunt of the destruction and seafloor habitats for ocean life were destroyed or damaged. This caused Jeng to come out from the ivory tower and appeal to society to pay heed to the severity of the pollution of the marine environment. In 2018, he published the results of his research team’s surveys and modeling, conducted over five years, of the trajectory of the flow of trash in the seas around the Dongsha (Pratas) Islands, which lie 400-plus kilometers southwest of Taiwan. It was the first ever academic paper from Taiwan published in the authoritative international journal Environmental Research Letters, and provides an important scientific basis for the management of plastic waste and for ocean sustainability.
Scientists use empirical surveys to gather evidence of the damage that marine debris wreaks on the environment. But in fact you merely need to walk to the nearest beach to discover overwhelming amounts of ocean trash; it just depends on whether you are willing to acknowledge what you see.
Take a stroll on a Penghu beach and you will see marine debris everywhere.