The hidden hell of the Maldives and the startup that is trying to save paradise

Paolo Facco

On many islands in the Maldives, rubbish is burned in the open. Making plastic-producing companies accountable can be a way to finance environmentally friendly waste management.

When we think of the Maldives, we imagine white sand beaches and clear waters. This, says Paolo Facco, is the picture that luxury resorts send to the world, but in the places where people actually live, garbage turns the paradise setting into a burning inferno.

"Resorts have a lot of money and manage to deal with their garbage (where this garbage ends up is another matter... but at least it's not visible). If we go to the capital Malé or other atolls where locals live, the situation is totally different: in On many islands the garbage is collected and simply burned close to the beach."

"It's a shame. The Maldives has an incredible ecosystem, it's a paradise", laments the representative of Adelphi, a think-and-do tank based in Berlin, Germany, which since March 2021 has been working together with the NGO.

Zero Waste Maldives to help the archipelago better manage waste, with support from the United Nations Development Programme. This startup's proposal is to implement an Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policy in the Maldives, which obliges "producers of plastic goods or companies that produce plastic packaging materials to assume responsibility for managing the waste generated by its products".

Speaking on the sidelines of the Oceans Conference, Paolo Facco says that the first step was to understand the local reality - how much plastic is generated and who are the decision makers. Now, this startup is working directly with the Maldives Government to define an action plan that makes the private sector responsible for managing the waste that the consumption of its products ends up producing. For example, "if a company places a PET bottle on the market, it has to pay a specific fee to ensure the collection, transport and recycling of that bottle."

"This concept has been applied for decades in several countries in Europe, in countries like Spain, Germany or France, but in developing countries it is difficult because they do not have a good waste management system", he explains. The Maldives has a particular characteristic that makes everything more difficult: it is an archipelago made up of more than a thousand islands, about 200 inhabited, so "the transport of materials between different islands is very expensive, since it is done in small boats and the price of gasoline is very high", explains Paolo Facco.

"We live in a plastic-based economy, where everything has to be packaged, and people can't deal with the garbage they produce," he recalls. Waste management is expensive and governments in many countries do not have enough money to implement sustainable systems, so holding the private sector to account can help.

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World's largest iceberg just broke off an Antarctic ice shelf

The floating mass is bigger than Rhode Island and covers an area more than 70 times that of Manhattan.

An enormous chunk of ice bigger than Rhode Island has broken off an Antarctic ice shelf, according to the European Space Agency. The floating mass covers more than 1,600 square miles, making it the largest iceberg in the world, agency officials said.

The iceberg, dubbed A-76, calved off the Ronne Ice Shelf into the Weddell Sea. The European Space Agency's twin Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites spotted the giant slab of ice breaking away on May 13.

The U.S. National Ice Center — which is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Navy and the Coast Guard — confirmed the calving event the following day and recorded the position of A-76 in the Weddell Sea.

"Iceberg A-76 calves from the western side of the Ronne Ice Shelf in the Weddell Sea and is currently the largest iceberg in the world," the organization tweeted Friday.

The finger-shaped iceberg is roughly 105 miles long and 15 miles wide, according to the European Space Agency. Its total area is more than 70 times that of Manhattan, New York.

It's not uncommon for an ice shelf to shed, and calving events occur naturally as these sprawling frozen platforms advance and contract. In recent decades, however, scientists have said climate change is causing worrisome changes across the Antarctic region. Global warming can, for instance, accelerate an ice shelf's retreat and cause it to collapse, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The European Space Agency said the largest iceberg title was previously held by a chunk of ice known as A-23A. That iceberg, which covers an area just under 1,500 square miles, is also currently afloat in the Weddell Sea.

While A-76 is huge, it's only about one-third the size of the biggest iceberg in recorded history. That designation belongs to an iceberg named B-15 that calved off of Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf 21 years ago. The B-15 iceberg covered more than 4,200 square miles when it broke away, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

Icebergs get their names based on where and when they were first observed. Antarctica is divided into quadrants, with the letters A, B, C and D used to denote the different regions. A sequential number is then assigned to each newly identified iceberg. As such, A-76 was spotted in the Bellingshausen/Weddell Sea quadrant and was the 76th iceberg tracked by the U.S. National Ice Center.

An iceberg that forms from another already-named iceberg is then given a sequential letter at the end of its name.

Denise Chow

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