Kenya wrestles with its plastic pollution problem

theguardian.com:

I n the sprawling dump in east Nairobi, Emmanuel Lucy rummages through glass, metal, leftover food and dirt. The 25-year-old waste collector sorts quickly, picking out plastic bottles with one gloved hand, and throwing them into a large woven sack with the other.

Lucy is one of thousands of workers who sort through Kenya’s street and landfill waste for recyclable materials. On a good day at the Dandora dump, he makes 350 Kenya shillings (£2) for several kilograms of plastic bottles, which he sells to recyclers through agents. It’s familiar work – he has done it on and off since he was eight years old.

The production of plastic products has exploded over the past decade. Nairobi, Kenya’s capital – with a population of nearly 4.4 million – generates more than 2,400 tonnes of solid waste every day – a fifth of which is plastic.

“The amount of plastic waste is quite significant,” says Jane Mutune, an environmental studies lecturer at the University of Nairobi.

Kenya banned single-use plastic bags in 2017 – a move that was lauded as groundbreaking. The national environmental authority says 80% of the public have complied with the ban. In 2020, single-use plastics were prohibited in protected areas such as parks and forests.

Despite the success of the bag ban, it has not been enough to eliminate the country’s struggles with pollution, as it did not include many other forms of plastic, including bottles, rubbish bags and takeaway containers.

“We need to be careful that we don’t defeat the essence of the ban by allowing so much [plastic waste] by primary packaging,” says the environmental activist James Wakibia, who pushed for the ban on plastic bags.

“Going down to the river and seeing so many plastic bottles and other kinds of