Beach Conservation Project

Every day, kilos of plastics and other polluting objects are washed up on Loedi beach. This beach, more exposed to the winds, collects floating objects. Loedi Bungalows and its neighbors have decided to take matters into their own hands, with the help of the local inhabitants and the village of Bo’a.

At Loedi we employ 2 people every day to clean up the beach, and we have built natural stone trash bins every 100m. Once full, we pick up the garbage.

Picking up plastic will prevent those particular pieces from entangling animals and ending up in the bellies of seabirds. Also, the pieces you do pick up can’t break up further into micro and Nano plastics which have their own nasty effects on the environment.

Plastic is a systemic problem with a thousand different causes and they all need to be addressed as a system. Telling individual people that they can make a difference is a lie. And we all sort of induce each other to live in that lie so that we don’t have to make the deeper changes that we’re afraid of.

So should we just let the trash pile up on our beaches? Absolutely not. Instead, it’s more important to remain realistic about what we set out to achieve. It’s a real mistake to pretend we’re saving the world with a cleanup but we should clean up beaches just because it’s the right thing to do.

Please help us keeping this beach clean, do not throw any rubbish, use the provided bins.

Pandanus trees are of cultural, health, and economic importance in the Pacific and Indian oceans, second only to the coconut on atolls. They grow wild mainly in semi-natural vegetation in littoral habitats throughout the tropical and subtropical, where they can withstand drought, strong winds, and salt spray. They propagate readily from seed, but popular cultivars are also widely propagated from branch cuttings by local people.

Species growing on exposed coastal headlands and along beaches have thick ‘stilt roots’ as anchors in the loose sand. Those stilt roots emerge from the stem, usually close to but above the ground, which helps to keep the plants upright and secure them to the ground.

While Pandanus are distributed throughout the tropical and subtropical islands and coastlines of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, they are most numerous on the low islands and barren atolls of Polynesia and Micronesia. Other species are adapted to mountain habitats and riverine forests.

The tree is grown and propagated from shoots that form spontaneously in the axils of lower leaves. Pandanus fruits and roots are eaten by animals including bats, rats, crabs, and cows, but the vast majority of species are dispersed primarily by water. Its fruit can float and spread to other islands without help from humans.

At Loedi  Beach we protect the Pandanus by building fences, so the animals (cows, pigs, goats) cannot eat their roots and seeds. They now can grow faster and renew. We also plant the seeds to increase their population.