Hainan’s successful campaign to keep oceans plastic-free is an exemplar of Asia-Europe collaboration on the same goal.
As the three-and-a-half month summer fishing moratorium in the South China Sea ended on August 16, over 13,000 fishing boats in Hainan, China’s southernmost province, went out to sea.
Ke Jingwei is one of those boatmen. He has been fishing for two decades near Sanlian Port in Haikou, Hainan’s capital, and early on August 17, Ke’s boat returned with the first day’s catch to the port, where many foodies were waiting, eager to buy fresh seafood. In addition to fish, Ke’s boat had a mesh bag containing a bycatch – plastic trash.
Ke is a volunteer in Hainan’s “plastic-free ocean” program, a pilot project started in 2021 and included in the EU-funded “Rethinking Plastics – Circular Economy Solutions to Marine Litter” campaign.
Fisherman Ke Jingwei (left) returns to the Sanlian Port in Hainan at night and a sanitation worker helps bring the marine litter collected by Ke to the shore for disposal. Shi Zhonghua of Haikou Daily
Regional Initiative, Global Impact
According to new findings by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization and the University of Toronto in Canada, the ocean floor has become a reservoir of plastic pollution, harboring between three to 11 million tonnes of plastic around the globe. These items, difficult to degrade, threaten the lives of a wide variety of marine creatures.
The problem has been aggravated by the wide use of single-use plastic products and packaging, which contaminate drinking water and the food chain. There are also other wastes dumped into seas and oceans, ranging from abandoned fishing nets to boats and even ships.
The island province of Hainan is rich in marine resources. Its extensive coastline means the fishing industry dominates the economy, accounting for nearly one-third of the province’s agricultural output value. Nearly 24,000 fishing boats operate in Hainan’s 65 fishing ports.
Ke has experienced firsthand the appalling effects of plastic pollution on the ocean. He said his catch has dropped dismally in recent years. “The fish get suffocated by the increasing number of plastic bags, nets, paint buckets, and disposable cups dropped in the sea,” he said to Hainan International Media Center (HIMC) mournfully. “Especially when there is a typhoon, the tides bring more plastic into my fishing net.”
Hainan’s “plastic-free ocean” program is not just a domestic initiative, it has both a regional and global nature. In 2019, China and six more countries in East and Southeast Asia – Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan – launched the “Rethinking Plastics – Circular Economy Solutions to Marine Litter” project to reduce marine litter, especially plastics. This three-year project was co-funded by the European Union and Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The objective was to find ways to manage plastic waste, sustainable consumption and production of plastic as well as reduce litter from sea-based sources. About 20 projects in the seven countries were to be implemented by the German development agency – the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) – and Expertise France, a French public international cooperation agency. In Hainan, the local implementing partner was the Hainan Research Academy of Environmental Sciences.
The region already had a history of international cooperation on tackling marine waste. In 2018, China, Japan and ASEAN issued the East Asia Summit Leaders’ Statement on Combating Marine Plastic Debris, which agreed to promote environmentally sound management of plastic waste and resource efficiency, including circular economy, product life-cycle management and sustainable materials management, as well as promote awareness, research and education on marine plastic debris.
However, despite the commitments and work already done, it still took nearly two years to create an effective and sustainable network in Hainan to kick off the “plastic-free ocean” campaign. Eventually in 2021, it started at Changhua Port, located where the Changhua, the second largest river in Hainan, joins the sea. At the forefront of the project are the volunteering fishermen who pick up floating plastic when they were out at sea and bring it back to shore. They get an incentive proportionate to the amount of trash they bring in, which is then either disposed of safely or recycled by the local ecological conservation department. A plastic collection and recycling system has been established at the port. Today, more than 500 fishing boats in five fishing ports are part of the campaign, with over 2,000 fishermen involved.
Fishermen at the Sanlian Port sort out the plastic refuse mixed with their catch on their boat.
First Volunteer’s Recollection
Zhong Qiangbin is the first volunteer at Changhua Port. He says one of the most thought-provoking experiences was coming across a plastic packet of instant noodles among the garbage he pulled out of the sea. “That variety was a hit when I was young, but now it has been been off the market for many years,” he told HIMC. “This means the empty packet had been lying in the ocean for a long time since it is hard to degrade, until I brought it back to the shore.”
The effects of plastic pollution and the campaign to address it go beyond the region since seas and oceans have no borders. Lü Shuguo, a researcher of the Hainan Research Academy of Environmental Sciences who heads the “plastic-free ocean” program in Hainan, says since oceans are connected, it is difficult to allocate responsibility for marine pollution or preservation.
China takes the governance of marine litter seriously, with the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) including ocean litter in their action plans for tackling plastic pollution. Dealing with the issue is a key task for the 14th Five Year Plan (2021-2025) for the marine environment. Similar efforts to collect ocean litter by fishermen can also be seen in other provinces like Zhejiang and Fujian with the support of local governments and some NGOs. In 2022, Hainan’s fishing-for-litter initiative was included in the list of institutional innovations by the MEE and will be promoted across China.
Hainan is also the first region in China to implement local legislation to ban single-use plastic products. A ban on the use, sale and production of single-use disposable nonbiodegradable plastic products took effect in December 2020.
In April 2022, the province hosted a seminar on the “Rethinking Plastics” project. Sébastien Paquot, head of section for climate action and environment of the EU delegation to China, said he was impressed by what Hainan had achieved in the fishing-for-litter pilot project. He called the island province, where the ocean is very close and everywhere around, the perfect place for such research and pilots in China. “It’s the place where people are the best to identify the issue and to really feel the difficulties in cleaning the ocean.”
According to Dr. Liu Xiao, project manager of GIZ, Hainan’s “plastic-free ocean” program has a comprehensive governance mechanism with multiple stakeholders. Starting with the fishermen, it also involves sanitation workers ashore who record and sort the trash, and the government departments who support them with incentives. “It is not a purely commercial activity or a purely government campaign and can achieve win-win cooperation between various stakeholders,” Dr. Liu told HIMC.
As the province that boasts the largest sea area in China and is developing a national ecological civilization pilot zone, Hainan has taken the lead to implement marine sanitation management in the entire province. Chen Qiwen from the Haikou Jingmei Sanitation Company said the company is responsible for collecting and sorting the trash that fishermen bring back at Sanlian Port.
In April 2024, Haikou issued a pilot implementation plan to provide institutional guidelines for the promotion of the “plastic-free ocean” program in more fishing ports. Statistics from the Hainan Provincial Department of Ecology and Environment show that from 2021 to 2023, the average amount of the trash floating near the coasts, under the sea, and scatted on the beaches around the island province continued to decline, decreasing by 83.2 percent, 81.7 percent, and 22.2 percent, respectively.
“Our waters are getting cleaner, as fishermen and other residents become more and more aware of the need to reduce plastic pollution around Changhua Port,” said Cai Jinsan, a local marine and fisheries law enforcement officer.
Fishermen share their experience in taking part in the “fishing-for-litter” program with youngsters at the Changhua Central Primary School in Hainan, December 2023. Photos courtesy of Hainan “plastic-free ocean” program team
Pearls and Necklaces
Lü Shuguo thinks the key to the success of the campaign in Changhua lies in roping in different actors from different segments of society. “Most of our job over the past year was to find such ‘pearls’ and to link them together into ‘necklaces,’” she said. Lü and her team visited almost all the fishing ports in the province and communicated with local fishermen as well as government departments. They then made an action plan based on the field research co-conducted with the China Blue Sustainability Institute (China Blue), the first NGO in China promoting sustainable development of fisheries and aquaculture.
Han Han, founder of China Blue, suggests that since the different fishing ports run different operations, the “fishing for litter” project should be implemented based on local situations, including the types of fishing boats and nets used, and the time the fishermen spend at sea. For example, at Huanglong Port, the fishermen spend a longer time at sea and use larger fishing nets than those at Sanlian Port. The traditional trash cans may take up a lot of space and impact their daily fishing. So Lü and her team stood in the fishermen’s shoes and tried to find better alternatives.
Fortunately, this problem was solved thanks to a special mesh bag hand-made from recycled waste by Zhao Yueying, an octogenarian volunteer at the Haikou Baishamen Environmental Education Station. Zhao has been making such bags for local fishermen for three years.
Marine protection is not limited to collecting ocean litter or cleaning up beaches. Improving public awareness and promoting marine conservation education are also important. Since September 2023, Lü’s team has held four marine conservation-themed activities in the Changhua Central Primary School. Apart from giving talks on marine science and the protection of ocean, the team tells students stories of the fishing community and about marine culture, especially the “plastic-free ocean” program. “We hope to motivate the pupils to protect the ocean around them starting from a young age, through their interactions with the fishermen volunteers in these classes,” Lü said.
To attract more social stakeholders, Dr. Liu Xiao from GIZ proposes a “plastic credit” scheme. You get a unit of plastic credit if you clean up a certain amount of plastic trash. The credit is transferable, like carbon credits, and like the latter, can be bought by both companies and private consumers to compensate for their plastic footprints.
In the long run, Hainan’s campaign is linked to the EU’s circular economy action plan that is a key to Europe’s transition towards a carbon neutral and circular economy. It is also one of the actions taken by China to contribute to the implementation of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals worldwide, the Paris Climate Agreement, and of course, China’s own dual carbon goal of peaking emissions by 2030 and becoming carbon-neutral by 2060. 
CHEN SHUMIN is a journalist from Hainan International Media Center based in Haikou.
