Transcript
Solomon Islanders are being encouraged to create their own eco-friendly bags, as a way to reduce plastic bag waste.
Last week the Solomon Islands government, with help from the Japanese government, launched the eco-bag alternative pilot programme.
The permanent secretary of the ministry of environment, Dr Melchoir Mataki, says the initiative is about encouraging people to share in the responsibility of managing waste.
He spoke with Leilani Momoisea, and told her that plastic waste is a huge problem and makes up 12 percent of Honiara's waste stream.
DR MELCHOIR MATAKI: That's a huge volume that we are looking at here. You would find a plastic litres [bottles] all over the place in fact I had the opportunity to also dive in the Iron bottom sound, which is the sea just off the coast of Honiara and 100 metres down into the ocean I could still see plastic bags that's the scale of the problem so it has a lot of other ramifications, environmentally as well as on public health because we do have a malaria problem in the Solomons and so plastic bags gather water and then that becomes a bedding places for mosquitoes which are the vectors for malaria, and then from an environmental perspective as well, the plastic bags get into the natural environment and into the ocean which can be really detrimental to the marine life, a third point is the Solomon Islands, we are trying as much as possible to promote our tourism sector and we would also like to, with Honiara being the gateway to the Solomon Islands, we really need to clean the city and plastics if we are able to control it and have it probably disposed of or even curtail the use of plastics would really help us in cleaning up the city.
LEILANI MOMOISEA: The eco-bag, is that something the Solomon Islands government has produced and will be giving out to the public or are you expecting the public to be creating their own eco-bag.
MM: What we have done is to have eco-bags prepared, designed, made and then sold at a nominal price of 10 Solomon Islands dollars which is probably less than five dollars New Zealand. The public buys the eco-bags but the overall intention is that the idea is for them to have an example or a model and then the public then ask to make their own eco-bags which can basically made out of old cut-off from pieces of clothes and things like that. That is the whole idea, we would like to enthuse the public in producing their own eco-bags, so that they can bring along when they come to the Honiara market and also when they go out shopping. For a developing country like the Solomon Islands we really need to work on sharing the responsibility of managing waste, and the best we could do is coming up with something small and interesting like this where by people are encouraged to take that responsibility.
