British diver films sea of rubbish off Bali

Bali, March 6 (IANS) A British diver has captured shocking images of himself swimming through a sea of plastic rubbish off the coast of the Indonesian tourist resort of Bali, a media report said on Tuesday.

A short video posted by diver Rich Horner on Facebook and on YouTube shows the water densely strewn with plastic waste and yellowing food wrappers and some tropical fish darting through the deluge, the Guardian report said.

The footage was shot at a dive site called Manta Point, a cleaning station for the large manta rays on the island of Nusa Penida, about 20 km from Bali.

In the Facebook post, he wrote how the ocean currents had carried in a "lovely gift" of jellyfish and plankton, and also mounds and mounds of plastic.

"Plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic cups, plastic sheets, plastic buckets, plastic sachets, plastic straws, plastic baskets, more plastic bags, plastic, plastic," he says, "So much plastic!"

The video shows Horner swimming through the mess for several minutes and also how the waste coagulated on the surface, mixing in with some organic matter to form a slick of floating rubbish.

Manta Point is regularly frequented by numerous manta rays that visit the site to get cleaned of parasites by smaller fish, but the video shows just one lone manta in the background.

"Surprise, surprise, there weren't many mantas there at the cleaning station today..." notes Horner, "They mostly decided not to bother."

Rubbish has been inundating Bali for several months now, washing over mainly from the neighbouring island of Java during the annual rainy, or "trash" season, the Guardian reported.

Indonesia produces about 130,000 tonnes of plastic and solid waste every day, with about half of that reaching landfill sites, according to the Bali-based, Rivers, Oceans, Lakes and Ecology (ROLE) Foundation.

The rest is either illegally burned or dumped in Indonesia's rivers and oceans.