Argentina - ‘Penguins nesting in boxes’: Valdés Peninsula, a heritage site awash in plastics

In recent weeks, images of plastic waste on the shores of Valdés Peninsula --a protected site in Chubut province, which has one of the world’s richest marine ecosystems-- have sparked outrage in Argentina. According to government estimates, there are 40 tons of broken crates, buckets, gloves and nets from fishing activitiesin the area.

In recent weeks, images of plastic waste on the shores of Valdés Peninsula --a protected site in Chubut province, which has one of the world’s richest marine ecosystems-- have sparked outrage in Argentina. According to government estimates, there are 40 tons of broken crates, buckets, gloves and nets from fishing activitiesin the area.

A veritable sea of plastics has been accumulating for months in Punta Delgada, Estancia El Pedral, Bahía Cracker, Punta Cormoranes and the islands of Tova and Tovita, which are part of the 887,000 hectares of land and sea that make up the UNESCO Natural Heritage of Humanity site (it was given that status in 1999).

The news exploded on the front pages of Argentine newspapers in April, following complaints about delays in the cleanup. The removal of waste eventually began in the last week of April and will continue until the end of May, as long as fauna is not found on the coast. Now, the issue is resolving the cause of the problem: why is there so much garbage from the fishing industry being thrown into the ocean in the first place?

The Valdés Peninsula is a nature sanctuary where penguins nest and the southern right whale breeds, and it is the natural habitat of elephant seals, sea lions, dolphins, orcas and countless birds. “I saw injured animals on top of the plastics and, in Tovita, penguins are nesting inside the boxes; one also sees some dead [penguins] surrounded by garbage on the coast,” says Yago Lange, a former Argentine Olympic sailing athlete and an ambassador for Parley of the Oceans, an international organization that works to preserve the oceans.

For some time, Lange has been sounding the alarm about the beaches polluted by waste from fishing boats, denouncing the delays in removing the waste and documenting the situation. He says that the state of affairs has worsened in the last six months.

Provincial and national authorities and the fishing industry recognize the problem. The Vice Minister of Environment, Sergio Federovisky, has spoken of the urgent need to identify the perpetrators of what he described as a “criminal action against the environment” and to sanction the guilty parties. “It is necessary to understand the dynamics in which…[someone] decides to brutally and maliciously externalize its costs by dirtying such a valuable natural resource like the coastal areas of the province of Chubut,” the official said.

Chubut’s Undersecretary of Environmental Management, Fernando Pegoraro, has admitted that the amount of waste on the coast has increased over the last five years, but he notes that inspections of the area are more comprehensive. The province of Chubut has 1,600 linear kilometers of coastline. Almost a third of them are inaccessible because of the area’s cliffs, where waste accumulates after being dragged there by winds and tides.

According to Pegoraro, two parts of the area are particularly affected by this situation. One is a 3-kilometer stretch of beach where the authorities estimate there is “about 100 cubic meters of garbage.” They have also detected “another 100 cubic meters [of refuse]” in a 7-kilometer area of beach on two islands. One cubic meter is equivalent to 200 kilos (440.9 pounds) of waste. Based on that estimate, there’s at least 40 tons of garbage. “The fishing industry is obviously the guilty party, but we cannot determine the ship or the company [and we don’t know] whether [the fisher] is national, provincial or international,” the official said.

‍