The Maldives – well known for it’s crystal blue waters, brilliant white sands and those boats with the glass bottoms that let you see the coral reefs. This is the last place on earth you’d associate with the word “rubbish dump”. But there’s something sordid just a stone’s throw away from the swankiest hotels on earth. There’s something smelly on the horizon. It is ‘Rubbish Island’, and it stinks to high hell.

Visitors who have flown in to the island are treated to incredible views of the scattered dots of paradise – though some recall seeing smoke, billowing on the horizon. That smoke comes from Thilafushi Island,the place where all the old champagne bottles, used condoms and left over food from the hotels go to die.

No outside visitors ever set foot on ‘trash island’ – only locals and migrant workers. A man from Bangladesh, one of dozens of employees on the island, is paid  $350 a month for working seven days a week in 12-hour shifts – and all he has to do is collect all the rubbish into one big pile, and then set it alight. The guy is walking over mountains of trash, coughing and choking after having worked on the island for four years now.

Before we used to separate cardboard and glass, but now the company is not so strong

Apparently the trash-company was promised a high-tech incinerator and trash sorter – this didn’t happen. Now they only separate plastic bottles, engine oil, metals and paper – which are sent to India. This means that trash is now The Maldives’ biggest export (tourists being the biggest import).

This means that all sorts of electronics, some containing lead, are burned along with the old jetski’s and stained linen. According to Ali Rilwan, an environmentalist with local organisation Bluepeace Maldives,

The batteries contain lead. There are products with mercury in them. All of these can easily get into the food chain. Unlike landfill, this is the ocean they are filling.

The original article was sourced from the Mail & Guardian, but we were so intrigued by this calamity, that we had to go searching for some more images – it looks pretty terrible.

[Source : The Mail & Guardian]