Our team on Mantanani Island, Sabah started the new year strong and proud. On 5 January 2021, they alongside the local members sent 753kg worth of plastic bottles out to the recycling facility on mainland, Kota Kinabalu.
The great news is that the local community is doing an amazing job in recycling their waste and we got RM150.60 in revenue from the recyclables this trip.
The not-so-great news is that land transportation cost RM120, boat transportation and labour cost us another RM1000.
This has been going on every 3-4 months since 2018 when the plastic bottles and waste get sent out to mainland. In 2020 itself, a total of 66,337 plastic bottles and 17,737kg worth of trash have been collected. The Waste Management Improvement Program we have in Mantanani has implemented a proper waste management system on a few villages with a total population of almost 1,000. Ultimately, we will continue leading and hope to inspire the community members in taking on this initiative themselves.
As you can see, currently there is no feasible and affordable way for the communuity members to do so, especially when it comes to waste transportation. The work has been challenging, but we have continued to make progress thanks to your support.
Your continued support has and will enable us to continue working with the community on the Waste Management Improvement Program and bring real change and solutions to the community on Mantanani Island.
From April to June this year, our team has prevented 12,642 plastic bottles from discarded into the sea making it up to 22,421 bottles collected just for this year alone. The bottles were collected and sent to our Mantanani Plastic Recycling Centre. The bottles will be compressed to reduced the volume before sending it out to mainland. In June, we have sent out 593kg of plastic bottles to the recycling company in Kota Kinabalu.
On April 24th, we have also replicated the successful waste management system from Siring Bukit Village to Padang Village. The replication started off with 30 houses and will be expanded to cover the whole Padang Village periodically. After almost two months of replication, the household members that participate in this trial are getting more familiar with the segregation and habit of keeping their trash for the collection instead of discarding it to the sea. Since the replication, we have managed to prevent 2,189kg of trash from ending up polluting our reefs ecosystem. In summary, a total of 52 houses are now part of our waste management system, and the total amount of waste prevented since January to June is approximately 4990kg, of which 90% are food waste.
For our ocean, for our biodiversity, for our generation and future!
Since early Jan to 19th of May 2020, our team has collected over 11,000 plastic bottles through our Plastic bottles recycling program.
Last year we have collected and recycled over 50,000 plastic bottles.
Normally plastic bottles are discarded to the sea or burn due to the absence of recycling system on the island. However, Reef Check Malaysia has set up a plastic recycling system in Mantanani and with the active participation from local community, we have successfully reduce the number of plastic bottles from ending up in our sea.
So let's ensure our plastic get recycled so we won't be wasting more resources to produce more plastic.
At the moment, we have recycling bins distributed around the island and covering more than 100 houses. Hopefully we will be able to cover all houses by end of this year!
Thank you to Mantanani villagers and GlobalGiving donors for the active support and participation!!
We have rented a piece of land (30ftx20ft) to build a waste segregation centre for Kampung Padang (Padang Village). There will also be an open food waste area for cows to feed in. Now, we need additional funding to complete the construction.
We have started regular household collection for the first cluster of homes since 24th April 2020 but some households are still adjusting to the system. We still notice food waste mixed with plastic sachet, or people still throwing trash to the sea. But we will continue to monitor and remind them. Hopefully, we will see a full compliance by the end of this month.
The first cluster of 30 homes were given different materials for segregation such as:
Total waste collection in Week 1:
Food waste: 286 kg
Can/Glass: 13.2 kg
Other trash: 20.8 kg
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