Abidjan: What can be done to prevent Africa from becoming the world’s biggest dumping ground for plastic?
That’s one of the big questions facing United Nations members next week at a stock-taking on Earth’s environmental woes.
From Antananarivo to Dakar via Nairobi and Conakry, African cities are scarred by huge landfills where plastic waste is measured in the thousands of tonnes.
The dumps are smelly and dangerous, releasing smoke and toxic particles. They are also a place where impoverished men, women and children pick through the filth to find enough to survive.
Blown by the wind or swept downstream in rivers, plastic waste pollutes the sea, forests and fields, threatening wildlife — and eventually humans too, because microscopic particles enter the food chain.
“The plastic bags are real killers,” said Hama Abdoulaye, a shepherd living near Niamey, the capital of the Sahel state of Niger.
“The animals swallow plastic when they graze on the grass, and die slowly.”
The UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which hosts the three-day UN Environment Assembly opening in Nairobi on Monday, says plastic pollution in Africa is accelerating, driven in part by poor rubbish collection and lack of recycling facilities.
The problem poses “a significant threat for the environment and the economies of the continent,” it said in a recent report.
Some 300 million tonnes of plastic waste — the equivalent weight of the planet’s human population — are produced each year.
But globally less than 10 percent is recycled, a figure that anecdotally is far smaller in Africa, although reliable statistics for the continent are rare.
“If nothing is done in a few years, Africa will become a dustbin of plastic bags and waste,” said Ousmane Danbadji, head of an NGO called the Niger Network for Water and Sanitation.
