The rubbish disposal is the main problem that needs to be solved to protect the war graves.
It’s a problem across the Pacific, because many, maybe most, islanders still follow traditional waste disposal methods with modern materials which aren’t eaten by animals or bio-degraded like traditional food and natural materials waste. The sea was used as a waste remover in island societies which erected their huts over or near the water and dumped their waste, including bodily wastes (notice how delicate I can be when I’m being serious 
) straight into it, which caused its own disease problems but at least the wastes were broken down very quickly, unlike modern plastics and metals.
The problem is compounded on Tarawa because of the density of the population and because, like other atolls, there isn’t a lot of land available for landfill.
Once famed for their white-sand beaches, the islands of the Pacific are threatened by a waste mountain. Rubbish now clogs streams flowing into the harbour in Samoa’s capital Apia, and floats through the mangrove forests of Fiji.
Every part of the region is affected. And one of the biggest battles in many island societies, say experts, is raising awareness of the problem.
Traditional waste disposal in the Pacific consisted of throwing food scraps to your pigs, but swelling populations and the import of foreign goods have changed the makeup of domestic rubbish.
“The waste of yesterday was mostly natural,” says Asterio Takesey, director of the South Pacific Regional Environment Programme.
“Now that many islands have entered the modern economy their consumption pattern has changed.” The problems are worst in the low-lying atoll countries of Micronesia.
“Rubbish is piling up,” says Ritia Bakineti, who works in waste management for Kiribati’s branch of the programme.
Kiribati’s capital South Tarawa is the most crowded corner of the Pacific, with nearly 40,000 people on a string of coral islets stretching for nearly 20 miles along the southern fringe of the atoll.
The most crowded islet, Betio, is more densely populated than Tokyo.
South Tarawa’s households generate up to 6,500 tonnes of solid waste every year and its three landfill sites are ill equipped to cope.
A report in 2000 found that only one of the dump sites was protected by a sea wall, meaning that rubbish from the others gets swept out to sea and along Tarawa’s beaches when high tides inundate the land.
Ritia Bakineti says that it does not need the tide to dump rubbish into the water.
“For households it’s quite normal to push the rubbish out into the ocean or the lagoon,” she says.
The effects are already tangible. Testing in the mid-1990s showed such high levels of pollution in Tarawa’s lagoon that locals are now told not to eat raw shellfish from it.
There are also worries about contaminants from landfill sites leaching into Tarawa’s fragile groundwater supplies.
Fresh water on atolls is pumped from the water lens, a narrow layer of rainwater floating on top of seawater seeping into the porous coral rock of the island.
This resource is easily exhausted or tainted, and in recent years Kiribati’s health department has declared several wells unfit for use.
But Kiribati’s problems are insignificant compared with compared to those of neighbouring Tuvalu, a country whose total land area is less than a third of that of Tarawa.
One recent report estimated that the 4,000 people living on the 2.4sq km capital islet of Fongafale generate around 20,000 cubic metres of waste per year.
The island’s only licensed landfill has a capacity of 3,200 cubic metres, so large pits left over from the construction of its second world war airfield are increasingly used as unofficial dumping grounds.
When ‘king tides’ inundate the entire island, as they did in February this year, the retreating waters leave behind a detritus of washed-up debris.
Landfill manager Vavao Saumanaia says that waste is on a par with global warming, which many expect to sink the islands within 50 years.
Even traditional methods of rubbish disposal are getting out of hand - the 4,000-strong herd of pigs are creating their own waste problem.
For many of these islands recycling is an absolute must.
But the financial incentive is diminished by the relatively small amounts of material and by the cost of transport to far away compounders.
Where money and outside help is available, waste can be brought under control. Rarotonga is turning round its refuse problem, thanks to a $2.2m (£1.2m) landfill due to open next month. In Samoa there has been a Japanese-sponsored clean-up of the Tafaigata rubbish dump.
But Asterio Takesey says that the waste mountain is going to grow. “The Pacific needs to develop, and this waste is generated by growth.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2004/nov/15/internationalnews.waste
