Beaches At WWII Island Battlefield Now Swamped With Garbage

TARAWA, Kiribati — "On the beach at "Bloody Tarawa," where U.S. Marines died by the hundreds, the broken bottles, crushed boxes, and plastic bags are now piling up by the millions.

Rotting under the equatorial sun, the garbage of an open dump is spreading over a section of World War II's Red Beach, a strip of sand hallowed in American military history. It's a sign of the crisis of solid waste that threatens to overwhelm the tiny atolls of the Pacific, tropical "paradises" whose beauty already is often marred by layers of debris: rubbish with nowhere to go.

Here in Tarawa atoll, a curl of small, narrow, and overcrowded coral islands ringing an aquamarine lagoon, the Kiribati government is making slow progress, opening one trash landfill and building another.

But island governments everywhere say they need more help. "We urgently need access to effective and affordable technologies, including recycling equipment, before this issue of wastes becomes critical," Jagdish Koonjul of Mauritius, head of the Alliance of Small Island States, told a U.N. conference in March."

EDIT

http://www.enn.com/news/2004-05-13/s_23852.asp

Sounds like the island is way overpopulated to sustain the amount of trash being generated. I wonder if they could install incinerators that would allow them to burn much of the trash off and generate electricity for them as an added benefit?