Despite Covid-19, NGO gets help to tackle plastic pollution in Sandakan

 By Olivia Miwil - June 23, 2021 @ 1:11pm

Floating litter trap at Sandakan Mosque and end of Sim Sim water village. - Picture courtesy of Future Alam Borneo

SANDAKAN: Future Alam Borneo continues to find ways to tackle plastic pollution despite Covid-19 challenges.

Its chairman Anton Ngui said FAB and local community members had been working on trapping floating trash around Berhala island and Sim Sim water village here for the past year.

Funded by a grant from their community partner Khazanah Nasional's Yayasan Hasanah, the Sandakan Plastics Solutions Project had attempted to trap and identify the floating pollution around Sandakan's bay.

It is also to analyse the impact on water quality and marine life through scientific data from various government and private agencies and ultimately rally the communities that live along the coastline to action.

"With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic globally, their ability to carry out their activities had been severely impacted, especially group activities with local stakeholders.

"However the continuous encouragement from FAB's Dutch partner CLEAR RIVERS who designed the ocean litter traps, meant that strategic planning and international networking was always ongoing even when physical groundwork was not possible due to the constant pandemic restrictions," he said in a statement.

Despite none of the organisations had met each other in person before, the ability to connect virtually through a collective passion for the environment proved that cross border collaborations could develop and bear fruit.

In October 2020, FAB was introduced to a group of postgraduate students from the University of St Gallen, Switzerland.

The group of six international students, calling themselves SIMocean, were brought together to fight plastic pollution for their collective love for nature and the oceans.

Through a series of clever fundraising events at St Gallen, despite Covid-19 challenges in Europe, the students were able to raise 5,400 Swiss Francs (RM24,000) to contribute to the work of FAB.

Ngui added that the funds would be used to build a temporary recycling hub in Sim Sim, the processing equipment and educational work.

The SIMocean, in a joint statement, said Sandakan and Sim Sim Village deserve a place where their kids could grow up happily and healthily.

"Given the world pandemic we have only conducted online events, we hope in the years to come to we will be able to physically come to the Sim Sim Village to make our impact stronger.

"We hope that in the future - combining efforts internationally as well as regionally - we can free the village from plastic and help create a sustainable, local economy that benefits from upcycled products that once were rubbish.

"We believe that Sandakan could be a role model that the world looks at a place that manages to control waste and use it to benefit the local economy."