Plastic chokes Indonesian islands as policies, enforcement slip through ghost nets
Ghost nets and plastic pollution plague Indonesia’s Anambas Islands, harming marine life and exposing the gap between regional pledges and enforcement. This environmental crisis is further worsened by rapidly surging growth-driven consumption, campaigners say. Devina Mariskova, head of Yayasan Anambas, said the nets are often thrown from vessels off the coasts of surrounding countries, largely placing the burden of collecting them on the small island chain’s coastal communities and...
By Ushar Daniele
Ghost nets and plastic pollution plague Indonesia’s Anambas Islands, harming marine life and exposing the gap between regional pledges and enforcement. This environmental crisis is further worsened by rapidly surging growth-driven consumption, campaigners say.
Devina Mariskova, head of Yayasan Anambas, said the nets are often thrown from vessels off the coasts of surrounding countries, largely placing the burden of collecting them on the small island chain’s coastal communities and conservationists.
“These ghost nets also trap large marine reptiles like turtles, and without any regulations, catching such vessels throwing the nets is very difficult,” Devina said.
The growing problem threatening marine ecosystems is a cross-border governance test for Asia and the wider developing world, as rising consumption, long coastlines and weak waste systems allow millions of tonnes of mismanaged plastic to leak from land into rivers, coastal waters and the open ocean.
“Pollution knows no border and will continue to bring a tide of plastics and other waste to our shores,” Dunxin Weng, zero waste campaigner for Greenpeace Malaysia, said.
According to a 2024 report by the French Development Agency, Indonesia produces 6.8 million tonnes of plastic waste annually, with an estimated 620,000 tonnes discharged into the marine environment each year.
About 360,000 tonnes of unmanaged plastic waste from the Philippines end up in the ocean annually, while Thailand, Vietnam and China are also among the countries dumping non-degradable items into the seas.
The disastrous practice has shown no sign of easing although UN member states adopted the landmark Global Plastic Treaty resolution in March 2022 – a legally binding agreement to cover the full life cycle of plastics, from production and design to disposal.
As policymakers met at the 11th Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, Kenya, on Wednesday to look ahead to the fourth UN Ocean Conference in 2028, marine debris and plastic pollution remained a major topic of discussion.
Hyunjeong Jin, associate programme officer on marine pollution at the Coordinating Body on the Seas of East Asia (COBSEA), said regionally, the goal was translating commitments into practical implementation on the ground.
COBSEA is a UN environment programme regional intergovernmental mechanism that brings together nine countries – Cambodia, China, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam – to protect the marine and coastal environment.
Jin said Asian countries should prioritise better data and monitoring, local implementation capacity, financing and stronger enforcement where needed, alongside measures to prevent and reduce plastic pollution at the source.
“By UNOC-4 in 2028, success should be seen not only through new policies, but through stronger implementation systems and measurable progress in reducing plastic leakage into waterways and the marine environment, including sea-based sources such as abandoned, lost or otherwise discarded fishing gear,” she said.
Campaigners, however, say global treaty talks and regional declarations have yet to deliver outcomes at the scale needed to tackle the plastic crisis.
Weng said the Asean environmental declaration and other regional frameworks showed the need for a human rights-based approach to reverse the tide.
“Asean countries are still waiting for the regional plan of action on the environment declaration,” Weng said. “Countries will still need to ensure that people are protected over profits.”
Other sustainability experts remain sceptical about whether pledges are achievable, given that many policies lack accountability mechanisms for implementation.
“I always say we have a lot of road maps, but we are not really seeing the roads,” said Renard Siew, a climate adviser at the Malaysia-based Centre for Governance and Political Studies.
Siew said the missing piece was execution with accountability, adding that data remained scarce on where debris enters waterways, which sectors are responsible and how much plastic is actually being avoided rather than simply collected from the ocean.
“Success should be measured by tonnes of plastic avoided, collected and prevented from entering our waterways, not by the number of policies launched,” he said. “Better data, stronger monitoring and clear ownership across agencies are what turn commitments into outcomes.”
Malaysia-based environmental watchdog Rimbawatch said there are concerns that policies on plastic and marine debris management focus more on recycling than on phasing out production entirely.
Adam Farhan, co-founder of Rimbawatch, said that while Malaysia’s 2021-2030 plastics sustainability road map set targets to increase the recyclability of plastic products and overall recycling rates, it had no focus on phasing out domestic production of virgin plastics.
“Tackling the plastic waste solution requires addressing both the management of waste and the phasing-out of production of key waste materials themselves,” he said.
For small island conservationists, the gap between policy and delivery is visible in the ghost nets that wash into local waters.
“We are doing what we can, but this is not a problem Anambas can solve alone,” Devina said.
This story was produced as part of the 2026 Our Ocean Conference Fellowship organised by Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.