When we think of the Maldives, we imagine white sand beaches and clear waters. This, says Paolo Facco, is the picture that luxury resorts send to the world, but in places where people actually live, garbage turns the paradise setting into a burning inferno.
“Resorts have a lot of money and manage to deal with their rubbish (where that rubbish ends up is another matter…but at least it’s not visible). If we go to the capital Malé or other atolls where locals live, the situation is completely different: on many islands, garbage is collected and simply burned close to the beach.”
“It is a pity. The Maldives has an incredible ecosystem, it is a paradise”, laments the representative of Adelphi, a think-and-do tank based in Berlin, Germany, which since March 2021 has been working together with the NGO Zero Waste Maldives to help the archipelago to better manage waste, funded by the United Nations Ocean Innovation Challenge mechanism.
The proposal of this startup is to implement an Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policy in the Maldives, which obliges “producers of plastic goods or companies that produce plastic packaging materials to assume responsibility for managing the waste generated by its products”.
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