Fishing Vessels A Threat To The Waters
The International Maritime Organization’s effort at stopping the dumping of waste for over two decades is deliberately being ignored by the fishing vessel operators in Taiwan and probably others as well. As I have observed during my five months of work aboard a Taiwanese fishing vessel “Ying Ta Hsiang”.
During our arrival at the port in Singapore, all the fishermen in the vessel were already awaiting repatriation back to their homelands. Some were Filipinos, Vietnamese and Vanuatus. These fishermen left a lot of used clothing and plenty of garbage on the vessel. When all the workers were repatriated and only two of the original crews remained to familiarize us of the workings of the engine and the deck, six of us (new crew) boarded the ship and we began our journey.
All of us were so excited that we are on our way to Taiwan where we will be spending about two months of ship repair. On the ship, I have noticed large piles of garbage mostly packed in sacks and ready for disposal. I checked the sacks and literally opened one by one to see what is inside and found materials that are hard or will take hundreds of years to decompose. Plastic bottles, mattresses, used clothes, rags heavily drenched with oil or grease, used oil and other materials placed in cans such as paint, paint additives and chemicals.
Since the garbage were nicely packed, I assumed they will be properly disposed off upon arrival at the designated port in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. To my surprise, only 3 hours from Singapore port, we were ordered to unload the garbage directly to the sea. The garbage sank easily down to the bottom of the sea and some remained afloat for sometime before finally sinking.
This irresponsible act should stop now or the sea will be a sea of garbage sooner or later. A reform of the current existing directives on what and what cannot be dumped in the high seas must be done quickly if we have to save mother earth.
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