How Tonga plans to recycle its mountain of scrap cars

ABC NEWS (Australia)

More than 30-thousand abandoned vehicles are sitting idle on the main island of Tonga. Accumulating over the past few decades the cost of removing the scrap cars is too high and they are now running out of space.

Transcript

00:00 It was actually quite shocking to be on this beautiful island and then just not too far

00:08 behind the main roads there were piles and piles of abandoned cars. It was kind of apocalyptic,

00:14 just four or five high in the air and just giant piles of cars. And the locals were really

00:21 concerned that it's a growing problem. 30,000 cars with a population of 100,000 people,

00:28 it's one every three people, it's a lot of cars. And they were just sitting there and

00:36 just in disarray really, there were definitely trees and things all over them. But it costs

00:43 a lot to import the cars, so people just use them till they die then leave them on the

00:47 side of the road. And then there's one man who was trying to pile them all up and get

00:53 them all together. But it was really, they need a whole approach, which is what they're

00:58 trying to do.

00:59 So are these scrap cars starting to have any environmental impacts for true?

01:04 Yeah, locals are really worried about the petrol and oil leaching through the ground

01:10 and there's been some studies done on this. So they've got together, there's the Environment

01:14 Department and there's also the local Waste Authority. And they have come up with the

01:18 Tongan Recycling Association and they've got grants together. They also got the landfill

01:25 together. There wasn't even a dump in Tonga before 2005. So they've tackled problems really

01:30 quickly and they're looking for a new solution now. So they're going to work with the Japanese

01:36 government to try and compact the cars.

01:39 Okay, can you tell us a bit more about that and what's been done to remove the cars from

01:44 the island?

01:45 Yeah, so they need to compact the cars. So they've got some grant funding to compact

01:52 them into small little cubes and they will be shipped back to Japan. And so they're working

01:58 really hard with all different aspects of locals and on other islands as well nearby

02:04 in the Pacific to try and make sure that car waste can be addressed and the cars can get

02:08 off the island.

02:09 [BLANK_AUDIO]

Category

Transcript

Recommended