A Wasted Opportunity?
As my second year was coming to an end, I was feeling unsure of the career I wanted to pursue after university. Many of my friends had already filled their summers with career-enriching opportunities. I, however, had just turned down a summer internship at a refugee camp in Calais and was feeling like I’d failed to do something productive with my last summer before graduating into the world of work. But then, when I was least expecting it, I found an exciting opportunity that fulfilled all my interests and my newfound passion…

You Are Where You Are Meant to Be
My summer plans were to travel and to get an internship, and clearly, one had proven more successful than the other. So, there I was, travelling around Southeast Asia on an Indonesian island called Nusa Penida preparing to board a boat back to Bali. The clouds were grey, and the temperature was humid, but the sea was a beautiful clear blue. The morning sun had started to peer through the thick clouds and onto the blissful beach. Local families lined the coastline in makeshift huts, whilst children played, and fishermen returned to land after an early morning at sea. It was breakfast time, and the locals ate Nasi Jinggo, a common Balinese breakfast of rice, beautifully and sustainably wrapped in banana leaves.

As I became more aware of my surroundings, my focus shifted to all the plastic on the beach, from large objects such as tyres, to smaller plastics like lighters, and then even smaller microplastics, barely visible to the eye. I thought to myself how such a picturesque place continues to be just that, even with so much discarded waste. It occurred to me that I had seen waste before, but never like this, not so unmanaged and abandoned in an idyllic paradise.

My attention shifted again, this time to a group of young boys, no older than 10, burning plastic on the beach. The thought of the boys unknowingly inhaling the dangerous fumes and innocently releasing toxic gasses into the atmosphere unsettles me. So much so, that I decided to approach them, to better understand their reasoning behind the act. Subsequently, they explained that this process was helping keep their beaches and homes clean. The unfair burden these boys felt saddened and shocked me, so much so, that I decided to take a picture, documenting how when waste is not managed well, it probably most often impacts the people who least contribute to the issue. Fuelled by the desire to help, I decided that this would form my dissertation thesis.

As if it was fate, after returning from Southeast Asia I got an email from the university detailing various ‘Summer Sustainability Internships’. I scroll down the list and land on one that fits perfectly to my newfound passion: ‘Political Ecology, Plastic Pollution and Research Development in S.E. Asia’, with Julie Gilson in POLSIS. I immediately applied and was thrilled when I was accepted. I then thought to myself that perhaps I was exactly where I was meant to be.

‘Thrown in At the Deep End’
On day one of the internship, I was quite literally ‘thrown in at the deep end’, as I co-presented Julie’s project at a Birmingham Plastics Network event. I was absolutely thrilled to be trusted with such an important task, as we would be pitching the project to other academics, from various disciplines across the university, who are all tackling the plastic crisis from different angles and perspectives. I was totally inspired to be in a room full of people so passionate about the plastic problem and the range of expertise at the event was astonishingly diverse: From individuals interested in sustainable polymer chemistry; to academics researching the toxicity of plastics in water; to others who were developing a second purpose for plastics, using the recycled material to form relief shelters for those in need. The workshop made me realise the importance of taking a collaborative, multidisciplinary approach to solving the plastic crisis.

Working with partners
At the beginning of the internship, we also started to plan out meetings for the project, trying to get partners on board to put in a collaborative grant application to study the plastic problem in Southeast Asia. We met over Zoom with several representatives from organisations working on marine plastic debris in Indonesia and Thailand. These meetings gave me a real insight into the work being done on the ground; I learnt more about waste pickers and about gendered barriers preventing women from working in the formal waste sector; and we discussed the feasibility of sending researchers to conduct focus groups and interviews to investigate how coastal communities show resilience to the plastic problem and the everyday politics of plastic pollution. These calls inspired, opening a sea of ideas for future career avenues.

The internship also gave me the chance to hone my research skills and I studied many international laws concerning plastic waste, noting that initiatives like the Action Plan to Address Marine Litter from Ships, which endeavours to achieve zero plastic waste by 2025, are being put in place. I also researched national laws and guidelines in Thailand and Indonesia, as these countries form the empirical focus of the project. I discovered Thailand is one of the world’s most polluted countries in the world, despite its many strategies and ‘master plans’ to manage its waste. Sadly, the plastic crisis continues to be wickedly hard to solve, as plastic has been woven into Thailand’s social and cultural fabric. The literature also points to the role of large private companies, such as petro-chemical ones, in impeding Thailand’s ability to implement environmental reform. Indonesia, on the other hand, appears to have only recently begun to implement laws and guidelines related to plastic waste. The National Plan of Action on Marine Debris was adopted in 2018, aiming to reduce land and ocean-based leakage of plastic into the marine environment by 70% by 2025. However, a lack of awareness continues to persist, with people dissociated from the fact waste upstream eventually leads to the oceans. Moreover, as Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelago state, it is incredibly exposed to the plastic waste problem, with many of its islands being vulnerable to marine-based plastic debris. In a demonstration of community resilience, many NGOs and organisations have been set up to tackle the plastic problem. Many of them focus on commodifying waste through ‘plastic banks’ to incentivise plastic collection and sorting, whilst also providing education on the importance of recycling and providing waste with a second life when possible.

Dissertation Ideas
One of the organisations I came across works in the ‘Coral Triangle’ and the area of focus intrigued me. I came to find out that it is a marine area in the Western Pacific Ocean spanning the territories of Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Timor Leste and The Solomon Islands, and it makes up some of the world’s most biodiverse and biologically complex ecosystems on the planet. In fact, it has been estimated the Coral Triangle is ten times more biodiverse than the Great Barrier Reef! This sparked the idea, that perhaps, I could write my dissertation on evaluating the impacts of plastic waste on the Coral Triangle and the communities that rely upon it, and then assess how these coastal communities have demonstrated resilience in their response to the plastic crisis.

Inspired by the Projects Partners
It was exciting to be in communication with organisations working on the other side of the world, on a cause I had become so passionate about. We had to explain how the project’s primary objective is to better understand the coastal community’s responses to the plastic waste problems and to analyse how community resilience is built, impacted, and affected by dealing with plastic waste and its management. We also explain how the project will focus on the mundane, investigating the ‘everyday politics’ of waste, and this would involve interviewing the organisations and the local communities they are involved with. We secured meetings with several people, and I produced a visual map of their organisations in Indonesia. We persuaded two organisations to become project partners and support us in hosting local researchers. The individuals we spoke to told us many stories of community impact and a changing tide of attitudes and behaviours towards plastic waste. We were also told that for some organisations recycling plastic can be a lucrative business. Corporations can offset their plastic footprint by buying plastic credit from organisations, and in return, the organisation promise to remove and recycle X amount of plastic from the environment. Although this market mechanism is of course successful, as it commodifies plastic and thus incentivises individuals to collect waste and take it to plastic banks in return for a profit, it can also be seen to create a counterproductive narrative and perspective related to plastic waste management.

The end of the internship
I was so involved and invested in the project that Julie and I ran over time! Before I finished, I was able to engage the services of a film production company in Bali to make a short film as part of the proposed project, inspired by what I had seen on the beach in Nusa Penida.

So, what can I say? Turning down one summer placement, in the hopes of another was definitely not a wasted opportunity. In fact, I have learnt more about trash than I ever thought I would, and it has opened my eyes to a complex issue which causes both societal and environmental injustices. Also, I have been so inspired by talking with organisations tackling the plastic crisis that I know now once I graduate into the ‘real world’ I would like to dedicate my career to solving one of the world’s most important issues of the 21st century.