The flip side of “Paradise”: the largest garbage island is a dump in the Maldives. Photo

Not all Maldivian Islands are renowned for white beaches and clear waters.

What makes the island with a shortage of land for disposal of hundreds of tons of waste produced by a million tourists a year and almost four hundred thousands of permanent residents? Of course, he dumps it on another island.

Stunning tropical Islands of the Maldives, located South-West of India and known for its sandy beaches and turquoise waters. But very few know about his dirty side. Just a few miles West of the densely populated city and the capital of the Maldives, malé is the island of Thilafushi, location of municipal landfills in the country. But Thilafushi not always been an island of garbage. In fact, it is even not an island.

Twenty-five years ago, Thilafushi was pristine lagoon, but in December 1991, a decision was taken to convert the lagoon into a landfill. So decided to deal with the growing problem of waste produced by the tourism industry. Within a month the debris began to arrive. The sand pulled out a huge pit, where the unloaded waste from malé and other inhabited Islands of the Maldives. All this was poured on top of a layer of construction debris and then uniformly covered with white sand.

Gradually Thilafushi began to appear plots of land, which the government has leased to industries such as boat manufacturing, cement packing, storage of methane gas and various large scale warehousing. Today, on an artificial island there are more than three dozen factories, a mosque and homes for about 150 Bangladeshi migrants, sorting daily arriving hundreds of tons of waste. Garbage so many that the island was increased by one square meter every day.

Part of this waste is drifting in the ocean and washed over the beaches of male, contaminating areas of the region. Environmentalists blame the impatient boaters to drop waste directly into the lagoon, because the unloading of the garbage often takes up to seven hours. Waste became such a problem that the government has banned a garbage dump on the island since 2011. Most of the rubbish in the Maldives is now exported for processing to India.

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