As part of the 2024 edition of the We Love Green festival, at the Bois de Vincennes, in Paris, from Friday May 31 to Sunday June 2, including The world is a partner, Kelly and Gary Bencheghib will be interviewed by Stéphane Mandard on Saturday 1er June at 6:15 p.m. on the think tank stage. Find the complete conference program on the website We Love Green.
The figure does not appear in tourist guides praising the “spectacular beaches” or the ” wild beauty “ from Bali: each year, the Island of the Gods and its waves of vacationers generate some 300,000 tons of plastic waste. The majority is not collected and ends up in huge open-air landfills which pollute rivers and ultimately beaches. It is estimated that at least 33,000 tonnes of plastic debris of all kinds end up in the turquoise waters of the Indonesian island each year.
The archipelago and its 275 million inhabitants are the second largest marine polluter in the world after China. On a global scale, it is the equivalent of a garbage truck full of plastic waste which dumps into the oceans every minute, reaching up to 14 million tonnes per year. And, at this breakneck pace, there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans in 2050, according to projections from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
To put an end to this scourge, States have begun tough negotiations under the aegis of the United Nations with the uncertain objective of reaching a global treaty before the end of the year. In Bali, “river warriors” from the Sungai Watch association are installing filter barriers on waterways to prevent plastic waste from ending up in the ocean.
“This plastic pollution crisis is a never-ending war”, explains Kelly Bencheghib. This 31-year-old French woman created Sungai (“river” in Malay) Watch in 2020 with her two brothers, Gary (29 years old) and Sam (27 years old). The Parisian siblings landed in Bali with their parents in 2005. They never left. “The beach was our garden; It was unbearable for us to see it getting dirtier and dirtier, so, fifteen years ago, we started collecting the waste. We didn’t think we’d dedicate our lives to it.”, says Kelly Bencheghib. Today, their cleaning operations have been extended to rivers, illegal dumps and mangroves choked by waste.
285 barriers deployed
Their first success dates back to 2017. Garry and Sam set off to board the Citarum, reputed to be the most polluted river in the world, in their kayaks made from plastic bottles. Two weeks of expedition paddling, making your way through the rubbish. The two brothers post videos of their journey on social networks. They are viewed by millions of people, including Indonesian President Joko Widodo. In December, he announced that he would mobilize 700 soldiers for seven years to clean the Citarum.
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