In 2015 I visited Kiribati for my graduate program - and it turns out that there is indeed plastic waste in the absolute middle of nowhere.
If you were to draw a line between Hawaii and Australia, the islands that comprise the country of Kiribati would be right in the middle. When you picture an isolated and largely uninhabited island nation in the middle of the South Pacific, you typically picture expansive, pristine white beaches. What doesn't immediately come to mind is a beach covered in trash from all over the world. The sad reality is that even the most "pristine" and remote areas in the world are all facing that same fate. Its estimated that around 8 million tons of plastic waste end up in our ocean every year - that one ocean is entirely connected, and that waste can be transported and deposited wherever currents dictate. Its arguable that no place on the planet is left untouched by our human footprint.
When we visited Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati - home to over 50,000 people, but only around 150 square miles (most of which isn't inhabited) and 3 ft at its highest elevation - we experienced this reality in action. The interesting thing is that many people believe that this waste found on the Kiribati coastlines is coming largely from other sources. And indeed, we saw packaging from several different countries that clearly didn't originate on Tarawa. Its also apparent that Kiribati is facing the same challenges as many other island nations, in that they rely largely on food imports from other countries, and due to those travel distances and food preservation most of those materials are heavily wrapped in plastic that then remains on the island with minimal capacity for recycling or proper disposal.
Indeed most of the plastic waste that we encountered around Tarawa was plastic packaging - the largest producer of plastics to date - which are low value, aren't readily recyclable, and are easily caught by wind or water and transported. Not surprisingly, most of this packaging was from products that had to endure long-distance travel and weren't perishable, such as instant noodles and crisps. We did also come across a fair amount of medical waste, plastic bottles, and household goods along the coastline and in the communities.
It seems that there is a fair amount of AID money coming into Kiribati that is focused on waste management infrastructure, such as the dump site featured above, but with Tarawa being a coral atoll there isn't much capacity for a proper landfill and most recycling can't be done on-island. This is of course not a problem that only Kiribati is facing - anywhere around the world where there isn't sufficient land, depth, soil, infrastructure, etc. face the problem of accumulating waste more rapidly than it is possible to collect, capture, and contain it, resulting in that waste largely ending up in the environment.
Once you travel north past the largely inhabited part of the island, there are still some breathtakingly areas that truly make you feel like you are on a deserted island in the South Pacific. Its incredible to think that if someone were to litter or a piece of trash wasn't properly captured in parts of Australia, S. America, and SE. Asia it could very well end up here.
