Coastal Trash at Northern Ubin [Chinese News Report]

A few days ago, Ria wrote a blog post about fish farm trash found and removed from the northern shore of Pulau Ubin despite the coastline being lined with security fence. The cleanup activity was coordinated by Chua Li San from Outward Bound Singapore. Officers from the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority of Singapore (AVA) and the National Environment Agency (NEA) were invited to view the situation from the seaward side. You can read more about from Ria's blog post here.

Today, Mediacorp's Channel 8 evening and night newscast reported about this situation and interviewed a few fish farms nearby.

Here is the news clip from Channel 8 news' youtube channel.

For the benefit of my readers who do not understand Chinese, I have translated the content of the video. It is not 100% translated but I tried my best to translate as accurately as possible the main points covered in the news report. I also did the Chinese transcribe of the video.

Translation (Coastal trash at Northern Ubin)The northern shore of Pulau Ubin is often seen littered with large amount of trash. In the most recent cleanup event, volunteers removed 165 kg of trash within a day. News reporter found out that among the list of items removed are abandoned fishnets and chemical containing plastic drums. These items may pose threats to and damage the ecological environment.  

Narrator: 

Otter rolling around on the sand, heron resting on the fence. However, oil drums, styrofoam boxes and plastic bags are littering all around. Outward Bound Singapore (OBS), who regularly organises coastal cleanup for the public volunteers, commented that such sights are common.  

Interviewee (OBS): 

Just two weeks after the cleanup, we found a refrigerator here. Why are there still oil drums present? Why are there still items used by the fish farms found here?  

Narrator: 

In the nearby fish farms, a fish farmer commented that the fish farms dispose their trash in the marina country club nearby. As for the oil drums, it is possible that they were either not securely tied or dislodged by the strong waves.  

Interviewee (Fish farm): 

During presence of strong waves, the ropes securing the drums may break, resulting in the drums to be displaced and float out. The direction in which the drums float to depends on the direction of the wind.The wire fences on the security barriers are old and damaged with holes. At high tide, if the trash is floating near the holes on the fence, they will be washed through towards the shore.  

Narrator: 

The fish farmers also feedback that sometimes during strong northerly winds, trash from the kelong of neighbouring country also gets swept in the direction of Pulau Ubin. Volunteers have noticed fish trapped and killed by abandoned fishnets along the coastline. Disposed plastic drums are found to have contained chemicals.  

Reporter: 

Although OBS and public volunteers have access to this Northern shore on Pulau Ubin to conduct cleanup sessions, it was not enough to resolve the root cause of this problem – a measure to control those who discard trash illegally or those who are irresponsible in their trash management. It is unknown, at the moment, the kind of marine damage or pollution these trash can cause. Personnel from AVA and NEA visited this area last Saturday (5 October 2013) to conduct some checks. AVA emphasised that it is an offence for fish farmers to dispose their trash into the sea. Currently, no one has been fined for such offence.

I'll be glad to update this translation should you have better translated sentence(s).

Seems like the fish farmer made it sound so easy for the floating trash to just pass through the broken security fence during high tide. I am sure that some of the items removed from the shore could not float. So how did these items get onto the shore then?
I do have some doubts about the accuracy of information in this news report.

What about you? I welcome you to raise any questions you might have from this news report. Just drop me a comment with your name.

Pasir Ris Site 6 Cleanup on World Oceans Day

8 June is World Oceans Day.
This year's theme is Youth: the Next Wave for Change.

To celebrate World Oceans Day, the International Coastal Cleanup Singapore (ICCS) organised beach cleanups at two beaches in the Northeast zone - Pasir Ris Site 6 (PR6) and Tanah Merah Site 7 (TM7).
On a drizzly Saturday morning, participants ranging from JC students, organisation and the general public came and did their part to remove as much trash as possible from the respective beaches.

Today I joined one of the locations for cleanup.

This whole stretch of shore is under PR6.

Pasir Ris Site 6 is no foreign land to me. Having organised the ICCS for my Secondary 2 students last year, I knew the amount trash this site contains. Many of us know that our beaches are cleaned every morning by contractors. However PR6 is not included in the cleaning process (probably due to low human usage?). Hence many trash either gets washed to the shore and gets trapped there, dumped or left behind by humans. Due to long negligence, many plastic products and other trash gets slowly buried in the oil smelling sand (the smell gets really bad deep in the sand).

A heavy rain started in the early morning and it was still drizzling when the cleanup began.
At 08:30, a small team gathered around BBQ pit 64 and Kai Scene, the NE zone captain for PR6 gave a briefing to those present. There were many who were either late or lost.

Short briefing by zone captain, Kai Scene

Gloves and trash bags were distributed after the briefing and everyone moved out to the cleaning area.
I moved as far out as possible to allow a wider coverage by the team. Actually the shore was really long and the furthest the team went was just past the discharge pipes. I started cleaning at the discharge pipe area while majority of the team worked at this stream covered with many plastics.

Lots of trash buried.

This part of the shore was of main concern. As seen from the image, there are simply too many plastics. We are not sure how much more plastics are buried in the sand at this stream. We tried to dig out and remove as many as possible.

Look at all the plastics on the surface

Soon after we started, more people found us and began their work too.

More participants coming in. Yay!

After 90 minutes of collection, it was time to start transporting the trash bags out to the weighing and drop off points. A human chain is the most effective way of moving the heavy bags out this long shore. A checkpoint had to be made as the human chain was not long enough to reach the BBQ pit.

Pass it on!

Continue passing

Chekpoint

We collected about 1.1 tonnes of trash, using up all 140 trash bag the ICCS team bought and even using usable bags picked up from the cleanup. There was a tyre rolled out, a big blue industrial drum and some other containers.

ALL the trash we collected.

At pit 64, there was a mini outdoor class about the marine animals that can be found on this shore.

It was a tiring but meaningful day.

Read more about today's cleanup at PR6 and also at Tanah Merah Site 7 by the ICCS team.

While we were cleanup up beaches, Ria and her team checked out another Southern submerged reef - Terumbu Semakau.

Read about the special anemones the team encountered in Ria's post.

And... Kok Sheng is back in action and he visits Changi shore. Hope he is recovering well.
Read about his findings here.