This article was originally published on HaRDstories.
Koh Lipe – Mr. Ao has been driving a garbage truck on this small Andaman island for years. Each season, the job gets harder.
“Most of the rubbish comes from tourists,” he said, standing beside his collection vehicle on a recent morning. “We’re starting to see construction waste dumped along the roads too. If you look around the island, some people have already started digging pits to bury rubbish themselves.”
Koh Lipe, a two-square-kilometre island in southern Thailand’s Satun province, draws hundreds of thousands of tourists each year to its white-sand beaches and turquoise waters. It’s also home to about 1,100 Urak Lawoi people, a seafaring ethnic group who have lived here for generations.
As tourism has boomed, so has the rubbish, creating a clash between the island’s traditional inhabitants and the demands of a modern resort economy.
The island now generates about ten tonnes of rubbish daily – 300 to 400 tonnes monthly – all of which must be sorted, loaded onto barges, and shipped to a landfill on the mainland, according to Detcharong Youklang, a village headman.
“During high season, we see everything, general waste, food scraps, beer bottles, shipping boxes,” he said. “Low season brings more construction debris and wood scraps. But the volume keeps growing.”
For the Urak Lawoi people, whose families have fished these waters for generations, the changes have been profound. Their ancestors lived with virtually no waste.
Before the plastic arrived
Pornsri Hanthale, 74, remembers an island thick with forest, before Tarutao National Marine Park was established here in 1974. Back then, there was hardly any tourism and almost no rubbish.
“What we had were dried leaves – we composted them,” she said. “Large branches became firewood. Dead trees we turned into charcoal for cooking.”
Before cargo boats serviced the island, Urak Lawoi men would row for two to three days to neighbouring islands, trading dried fish for rice, salt and seeds. The burlap sacks and rattan baskets that came back were made from natural fibres.
Human waste went into communal pits, three to four metres deep, covered with cooking ash to eliminate odours.
“I can’t even remember when I first saw plastic on the island,” Pornsri said.
Saengsom Hanthale, amongst the first generation of Urak Lawoi to earn a university degree, watched plastic arrive during the resort construction boom in the 2000s.
“We would collect plastic cups and bottles to sort and sell,” she said. “There was also tar residue floating in from road construction, probably from neighbouring countries. We’d boil it and use it to waterproof our boats. This kept plastic and trash to a minimum.”
The contrast is stark today. Soraphong Yadam, a local fisherman, recently spent 30 minutes collecting rubbish around his house as an experiment. He gathered 1.7 kilogrammes – mostly beverage bottles, foam scraps and snack wrappers.
“I didn’t think just collecting around my house would produce this much,” he said. “Liquor bottles, beer cans, foam, these aren’t things we use. I never thought this was a problem before, but seeing it with my own eyes, I’ll have to think about it now.”
A system under strain
Waste management falls to the Koh Sarai Subdistrict Administrative Organisation, which contracts a private company for collection and transport. Residents pay 20 baht monthly (about 0.6 USD) to have their rubbish picked up twice daily.
Volunteer groups supplement the official system. Trash Hero Koh Lipe, an environmental organisation, organises regular beach clean-ups. Village headman Detcharong leads daily morning collections.
But the system has limits. Storage space is scarce and transportation depends on barge schedules and weather. In the past, when rubbish couldn’t be removed on time, it piled up across the island.
Land disputes have complicated matters. One Urak Lawoi resident, who asked not to be named to avoid legal trouble, said some property claims have blocked access to public drainage channels and waste collection routes.
“A few years ago, disputes got so bad that villagers were sued,” the resident said. “Some land claims included walkways, paths to the school, and public drains. When problems got serious, contractors couldn’t reach certain areas. The rubbish just accumulated.”
Government investigators later found illegal encroachment and began revocation proceedings, the resident said, though the process has been slow.
Lack of regulations
Island communities across the world face similar pressures. In the Caribbean, several nations have banned single-use plastics outright. Barbados prohibited plastic bags in 2019 with clear penalties. Dominica moved against Styrofoam food containers that crumble into beaches and reefs. Aruba forbids importing single-use plastic packaging, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.
Koh Lipe has no such regulations. Thailand banned single-use plastic bags at major retailers in 2020, but the policy is not universal, and enforcement is minimal. Waste banks, voluntary plastic bans, and community recycling programmes have appeared on some islands, but these initiatives remain limited in scope and depend on sustained local commitment.
The Urak Lawoi watch the changes with growing concern. Their population remains rooted in fishing and traditional crafts, but younger generations are being pulled into the tourism economy.
Mr. Ao keeps collecting what he can. The system was designed for a fishing village. Now it serves hundreds of thousands of tourists. “Sometimes I think if it gets much worse,” he said, “it’ll be beyond our capacity.”
This story is part of a collaborative reporting project between HaRDstories and the Indigenous Media Network (IMN), supported by the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives.