On Friday, when the residents of Kappalangadi near Chaliyam in Kozhikode district opened their doors in the morning they were shocked to see that the road in front of their houses had disappeared. The more than one kilometre stretch of tarred road had turned a dumpyard of waste, covered mostly with wooden logs and plastic. The residents were not even able to walk on the road. The waste had been washed ashore from the sea in one night.
“The sea was very rough for the last few days. Since Thursday, waste started getting deposited on the shore. But on Friday it was too much, people were not even able to get out. The panchayat took two days to clean it,” ward member Nisha M Kappalangadi said.
Forty loads of wooden logs and pieces were collected in pick-up trucks from the area. “The waste was spread out in more than one kilometre and over three wards. Forty loads of wooden pieces were removed to the forest region,” Nisha added.
Apart from the wooden logs, there was a lot of plastic waste that is yet to be removed.
“The plastic waste, we have collected and kept aside. It has to be removed soon,” Nisha said.
In 2017 when cyclone Ockhi hit the coastal regions of the state, the residents had faced a similar situation.
“At that time, a huge quantity of plastic had washed ashore. But this time plastic waste was considerably less. Maybe the plastic content in the sea has reduced due to the lockdown,” the ward member said.
Priyesh Maliyekkal, a fisherman and environmentalist who has been collecting plastic waste from the sea for many years, however says that the quantity of plastic waste in the sea has probably not decreased.
“In the last one year, there have been efforts from fishermen groups to discourage people from throwing plastic into the sea. Moreover, as local self-government bodies started collecting plastic from the public, people dumping waste in the water might have also reduced. However, the sea contains waste that has been dumped for several decades. So I don’t think it has reduced,” he said.
Priyesh added that the wood washed ashore in Kappalangadi might have come through river water.
“There might be some estuary, so usually wooden logs are found in rivers,” he said.