“Ŋilmurru bukmak djäka wäŋawu – All of us together, looking after country.
In 2018, Sea Shepherd joined forces with the Dhimurru indigenous rangers of North-East Arnhem Land, Northern Territory for a remote marine debris clean-up mission.
Djulpan is a remote beach, far from any town or city. It is a culturally significant place for the Yolngu people and an important nesting ground for turtles. However, for the past decade, the Dhimurru rangers have been faced with an increasing tide of plastic pollution arriving on their coastline.
Together, the team’s plan was to remove as much plastic from the beach as possible. What they found was beyond comprehension; 250 million pieces of rubbish along the 14km stretch of remote beach. ‘Untrashing Djulpan’ tells their story.
Sea Shepherd is an international, non-profit marine conservation organization that engages in direct action campaigns to defend wildlife, and conserve and protect the world’s oceans from illegal exploitation and environmental destruction.
In 2017, China banned all plastic from entering the country. This single decision has disrupted the entire global flow of recycling. Stuff that once found its way to China is now ending up in Vietnam, Thailand, and most of all, Malaysia.
But those countries can’t process the amount of plastic China used to, and waste from the US, Europe, Japan, and beyond is piling up in small mountains.
China’s ban didn’t break the system, but it revealed just how broken it really is. In episode one of our Quartz’s video series Because China, they go to Malaysia, Shanghai, and New Jersey to figure out what is going on in the wild world of recycling.
There’s been a breakthrough in the battle against plastic pollution in the world’s oceans. A company based in the Netherlands called Ocean Clean Up has announced the successful trial of a new device designed to collect huge amounts of plastic by remote control. It’s been trialed in the Great Pacific Garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean, an enormous body of plastic waste that drifts on natural currents between Hawaii and the West Coast of the US.
