College Record 2019

Plastic in
Paradise
Josephine Mahony, Ecology and Climate Science student at Wolfson College, returns
from a successful mission to clean up plastic at the remote island of Aldabra. The
project was to return the island to its pristine state by reducing plastic waste.
Sir David Attenborough once commented that the Aldabra Atoll is ‘one of the world’s greatest
surviving natural treasures’. Aldabra, the world’s second-largest coral atoll, is one of the
Outer Islands of the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. It has escaped many human threats over
the centuries, but plastic pollution has found its way there. The project of clearing the
island of man-made rubbish was launched in 2018, with generous sponsorship, corporate and
individual. It has attracted growing international interest and was highlighted at the G7 Summit
in 2018 by the President of the Seychelles. The team, seven from the Seychelles and five
from Oxford, included Josephine Mahony, a fourth-year DPhil student at Wolfson in Ecology
and Climate Science in East-Africa. On 16 February they went to Mahé, the largest island in
the Seychelles, and on to Aldabra a week later, and only returned after five weeks of clearing
the beaches from plastic.
What was your first impression when you came to Aldabra?
‘Oh, I cried. When you come closer to the island, you realise that there’s life everywhere.
When we first arrived, there was an epic sunset, crabs all over the beach, sharks swimming in
the water, and turtles nesting on the beach.’
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And what about the plastic pollution?
‘We were based in the south of the island, a part of Aldabra that is very inaccessible, which
means that the plastic pollution there is hard to get rid of. There was a big difference between
the amount of plastic on the beaches there compared with more northern beaches.
In some places the plastic was two metres deep. It’s buried amongst the seaweed, but you’re
pulling out entire chairs; we picked up about fifty thousand flip-flops, and a mass of lighters.
We found just about everything you can think of that’s made of plastic.’
Photo: Christian B
Can you tell us a bit about the project?
‘There were three different phases, the first one being the clean-up phase. This was the most
physically intense part. The alarm went off at five in the morning, but it took a while to get
ready. We were in camps with bunk beds and a cooker. If you wanted to go to the toilet,
you had to work out when everyone else was going, and then walk a quarter of an hour
past spiky rocks and deal with the mosquitoes. We had ten cups of water a day each for
showering. All this meant we usually got started around 6:30. We’d walk to the nearest beach
while carrying water and the sacks we needed, food, and lots of sun cream. We would create
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