The Gili Islands depend heavily on tourism while the environmental conditions attracting that tourism are threatened by plastic waste. The task was to produce, in under 24 hours, a plastic strategy that a governing board could actually act on. Not a vision statement: a thought out and defendable plan. The three stakeholders had three incompatible demands
The environmental case pushed toward aggressive reduction and restrictions, tourism operators had an obvious concern: interventions that increased costs or reduced convenience could damage the economy the strategy was intended to protect, residents stood between the environmental degradation affecting the islands and the household incomes dependent on tourism.
A recommendation that maximised one objective while ignoring the others would be easy to write and difficult to implement. So I set a harder constraint: the strategy had to reduce plastic leakage without treating economic viability, local legitimacy or implementation capacity as somebody else's problem.
Rather than beginning with a ban, I mapped the plastic through the island system and designed interventions around the points where it entered, moved through and left that system. The resulting strategy followed five moves:
Remove or highly tax plastic that does not need to enter the islands - any excess and one use unnecessary plastic should not me entering in the first place.
Reduce demand for what remains - make tourists see the price of plastic, don't just include water bottles on diving trips, offer it as an extra with an additional cost.
Collect used material before it leaks into the environment - increase bin concentration, implement reward schemes for rubbish collection, reusable water bottles available on deposit or for rental.
Process it through a viable disposal chain - using tourists on ferries, empty shipping containers leaving the islands and larger processing centres elsewhere if possible.
Rebrand the transition so lower-plastic operation could become part of the islands tourism proposition rather than being framed only as a compliance cost - create events, make tourists feel included, everybody wins from this.
The strategy set two headline targets: 60% less plastic leakage by 2031 while protecting 95% of tourism profit, alongside visible progress in the first year. The sequencing mattered as much as the interventions themselves: bins before the fines, audits before banning randomly, pilots before scaling. Enforcement that arrives before the infrastructure required to comply with it reads as punishment. Infrastructure first makes later enforcement more legitimate and more feasible.
The financing model followed the same principle. Costs should fall primarily where tourist-generated waste enters the system, while smaller local operators need protection during the transition rather than being forced to absorb disproportionate compliance costs.
One of the most important parts of the sprint was identifying which apparently solid assumptions were actually carrying too much of the recommendation. Two claims in the source material were especially influential: an estimate around the size of the eco-conscious tourism segment and the assumption that strong restrictions would necessarily damage tourism. Both affected the commercial logic of the strategy. Neither was evidence I was willing to treat as settled. So the final recommendation explicitly identified the evidence that would need to be strengthened before implementation:
A proper current plastic-flow audit, because the strategy needs reliable volumes and sources rather than estimates.
Validation of the ferry and logistics chain, because any off-island processing model depends on it.
A stronger evidence base for the tourism-segment assumption, because the commercial case for repositioning the islands partly rests on whether that audience is substantial enough to matter.
Naming those gaps wasn't hedging. It was the difference between presenting a plausible direction and pretending the evidence justified more certainty than it did.
The 24-hour constraint taught the opposite lesson too: uncertainty cannot become an excuse to analyse indefinitely, some requests for more evidence simply postpone a decision.
© 2026 by Nicole Stott