Beer bottles outnumber tourists on Goa's Grande Island, clean-up exposes scale of neglect

PANAJI: Grande Island has no permanent residents, no supermarkets and no liquor stores. It takes about 30 minutes by boat to reach it and most tourists to Goa have never stepped on it. And yet, it has more beer bottles than a local tavern on a Saturday night. Divers who love exploring the island’s waters, its coral reefs and marine life are worried about the long-term impact on the island’s ecosystem.

“People go there for picnics but don’t pick up after themselves. They leave what their trash on the island,” said Sara Salamao, who runs a local dive centre with Elias Salamao.

The clean up drive drew a strong response from scuba divers, recreational snorkellers, fishermen and first-timers who had never dived before but who turned up anyway to get their hands dirty. Around 80 locals from various parts of South Goa as well as from Mapusa travelled to Bogmalo early in the morning to reach the beach by 8am.

“We were having trouble accommodating people on the boats. I asked friends from Baina and Velsao to get their boats and join us. In the end we had five boats. We filled up 180 bags,” said local spear-fisherman Regie Alvares, the man behind the initiative.

The group set out for the island around 9am and was back by 12pm. Not because the trash had been collected but because they ran out of bags. “I did not want to take the risk of bringing all the trash in the boat along with people,” said Alvares, who, at 52, plays football and loves going free diving. The 180 trash bags were handed over to a local recycling centre at Bogmalo.

“It was crazy to see so many beer bottles. There was a lot of single-use plastics. We also found a chair cushion,” said Salamao.

Aside from cleaning up the island, the diving centre has also been removing ghost nets from the seafloor every year. “Each year, we have dedicated days to only recover the ghost nets from the sea, hundreds of kg of nets,” said Salamao.
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