Hiayung Studio is joining the drive to clean beaches on Siaoliouciou Island (小琉球) by turning discarded fishing buoys into art, the Dapeng Bay National Scenic Area Administration said.
The office has been encouraging visitors to pick up trash along the beaches with a “beach currency” program, in which garbage is exchanged for tokens that can be used at 90 local stores, it said on Saturday last week.
The tokens are also eco-friendly, having been created from glass debris collected on the beaches by Lin Pei-yu (林珮瑜), a local artist and environmentalist, the office said.
Photo: Chen Yen-ting, Taipei Times
About 1,500 tokens have been handed out so far to participants of the office’s beach-cleaning events, it said.
However, the token program has encountered some difficulties, as many people decided to keep the tokens as keepsakes, while others had trouble finding the stores that accept them, so only 500 were actually put into circulation, the office said.
So it worked with Hiayung Studio to turn discarded buoys into signs for the shops that accept the tokens, it said.
Photo: Chen Yen-ting, Taipei Times
The buoy signs are deliberately left half-decorated to remind people what beaches would look like without cleanup efforts, artist Kuo Fu (郭芙) said.
There is a lot of debris from commercial fishing boats in the waters near Siaoliouciou, a large part of which is plastic buoys that do not degrade and are hard to recycle, Kuo said.
Buoys can be found all over the island and are a more of a menace to the environment than other types of marine debris due to their bulk and sheer numbers, she said.
The bullet-shape of many of the buoys suggest they came from Chinese fishing boats, she added.
Environmentalists are trying to gather as much marine debris as possible that can be incinerated on Taiwan proper, while other items are recycled through various creative projects such as the one at her studio, Kuo said.
A local fisher said that buoys that become damaged during use often drift away and confirmed that the bullet-shaped ones are usually made in China.
“The Chinese buoys are flimsy, bulky and hard to repair, and it is a mystery to us why they make so many of those things that end up as garbage,” the fisher said.
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