The past week I've been editing a document about Micronesian countries like Fiji, Samoa, Palau and the Marshall Islands. The report is in excess of 100 pages, discussing problems related to the disposal of large, bulky waste (gotta love the use of the term "bulky", eh?). You would expect this to be a dull document, but I'm totally digging it.
I remember being overwhelmed (with boredom) when, years ago at a JET conference, a presenter rambled on about the (unbelievably mundane) subject of speech pathology, so I know I run the risk of sounding like a nut myself, but haven't you ever wondered what someone does with a broken refrigerator when they live on, say, a 4-mile atoll made of coral no more than 2 meters above sea level???
(*If your guess is that they raid their next-door neighbor's fridge, you might not be wrong, but there is a statute of limitations on that, as anyone who has raided a friend's fridge will know.)
Well, reading about the beautiful scenery of these island paradises and imagining lounging on the beach or spending a lazy day in a breezy Samoan house (these are structures without walls, known as fales, which, if you'll forgive the spelling discrepency, could make a brilliant pun), especially when you are currently wearing a suit and sitting in an office, makes one consider vacationing in Korkor or Savai'i. The population of some of these countries is little more than my hometown, and since they are made up of numerous islands, at least one I read about has only 23 residents - and is politically considered its own state! Indeed, there's already a booming tourist industry in Fiji (don't worry, the military coup ended last month). So as one could imagine, protecting the scenery, which vacationers travel long distances to experience, should be a top priority.
That's why it's sad to think that when up to 2000 cars are scrapped every year in these countries, that the parts will be salvaged, but the car body left to sit, virtually stranded, on the island for the foreseeable future (anybody know how long it takes for iron to decompose?). The sad fact is that it's too expensive to remove items like this without compactors, and neither the technology nor the infrastructure, not to mention space, exists in these places.
For millenia native peoples lived on these archipelagos, and until about the 1980s, there was almost no waste at all; things were almost entirely produced and consumed domestically. They had what is referred to (by us eco-geeks) as a "sound material cycle"; something that developed countries are trying to "re-develop" presently in our societies. Take the Marshall Islands for example, a group of islands Europeans came across in the late 18th century (you probably guessed it, by a captain named John Marshall - a pretty interesting character, by the way). This string of islands is well known, unfortunately, for Bikini Atoll where the "Captain Bravo" hydrogen bomb testing took place. Nonetheless, the CIA World Factbook states that the best hope for this nation's future is tourism (anybody wanna visit Majuro or Kill?). These small island nations don't have much in terms of capital when you look at it from a "globalization" perspective, but they now have the demand, and by golly, if those people want automobiles and air conditioners then someone will find a way to sell it to them.
To be fair, a large portion of these items are also imported as gifts from family members or friends who have immigrated overseas. But in either case, once these items find their way to the island and are repaired repeatedly for all they're worth, then the islanders are stuck with them. So, the answer to the above question is really more of a rhetorical question than anything. What happens to a broken fridge in Fiji? In fact, the natives have (one would hope) started asking themselves this very question.
Posts
