“If it’s Amihan, most of the trash comes from the other areas or wherever,” said Calderon about plastic waste being carried by the northeastern wind. “And when it’s Habagat, it goes to the other side. They can’t exactly identify which parts they come from because as long as you throw it into the sea, that’s it. There’s no more address.”

Calderon says that the plastic hurts Donsol’s tourism business for whale shark spotting and even quite possibly the whale sharks themselves.

“They are still trying to decipher as to why the population of whale shark is decreasing. What I can say is that every time you go out, you would always see trash floating around” Calderon remarked. “If the area is polluted, eventually people will know that you should not go there because the area is polluted.”

As the third highest contributor of plastic waste in world, Calderon posits that a main factor to the country’s pollution of plastic stems from the psychology of the Filipino consumer. Describing how Filipinos tend to purchase goods in small packets, Calderon says, “it’s the tingi mentality,” pertaining to items such as sachets of soap and plastics of small chips.

He does see hope in Filipino society to be more conscious about the pollution we create. On their way out of the coastal site, he notes how the tricycle drivers separate the biodegradable from the non-biodegradable trash as well as the municipality using eco-bricks (large PET bottles stuffed with plastic waste) for infrastructure like benches.