Wet Season means garbage on the beaches in Bali

An annual source of conversation and frustration is the garbage that washes up on the beaches in the wet season. I walk on the beach in Seminyak some mornings and with every tide, there is a line of seaweed and mad made garbage. Everyone has their own idea where it comes from. A lady who wrote to the Jakarta Post recently complained it was western tourists. Ask a Balinese and they’ll say it floats over from Java. Ask an expat and they’ll probably tell you it washes down the rivers.

In the wet season there are changes in the winds / currents etc. but I reckon most of thre junk is home produced. A couple of experinces showed me this, including one time when I was in the highlands chatting to a local. His wife came out of their shop, opened a plastic packet and threw the waste plastic down and drainage canal.
Years ago in Bali this was how people lived, eating off of a banana leaf and tossing the things away to arrive in the ocean sometime later. When people don’t go to the beach they don’t care that the garbage ends up there.
Another time I was riding by a drained rice field, which was covered in plastic packets. Its a problem, and one that is likely to get worse, just like many other places (Fiji etc.). In Seminyak the better hotels hire a squad of people to rake the beach every morning. Moving dirt from one place to another seems to be a career for a lot of people over here.