[As Africa Drowns in Garbage, the Plastic Business Keeps Booming]
[[link removed]]

AFRICA'S EXPLODING PLASTIC NIGHTMARE  
[[link removed]]

 

Sharon Lerner
April 19, 2020
The Intercept
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ As Africa Drowns in Garbage, the Plastic Business Keeps Booming _

A woman takes a break from collecting waste to read the newspaper at
the Dandora municipal dump site in Nairobi, Kenya, on Feb. 15, 2020.,
Khadija Farah for The Intercept

 

ROSEMARY NYAMBURA SPENDS her weekends collecting plastic with her
aunt Miriam in the Dandora dump in Nairobi. Because the bottles they
sell to other plastics traders are mixed in with discarded syringes,
broken glass, feces, fragments of cellphone cases, remote controls,
shoe soles, trinkets, toys, pouches, clamshells, bags, and countless
unrecognizable shreds of thin plastic film, the work is time-consuming
and dangerous. But Rosemary, who is 11, is hopeful that her effort
will pay off. Several of her six cousins, whom she has lived with
since her mother died, have already dropped out of high school because
her aunt couldn’t afford their school fees. If Rosemary makes it
through elementary and secondary school, and then college and medical
school after that, she vows to return to Dandora. “I see how people
get sick a lot here,” Rosemary said on a recent Saturday, as she
stood atop a mound of rancid trash. “If I become a doctor, I would
even help them for free.”

It will take a long time for Rosemary to earn enough to pay for school
with her earnings from discarded plastic. Everything that’s worth
anything in Dandora, which stretches for more than 30 acres in the
eastern part of the Kenyan capital, is contested. Groups of local
businessmen control who trades and collects waste in the dump and even
charge fees to enter certain areas. Birds, cows, and goats have staked
out their own grazing spots on the mounds. And waste-pickers sometimes
fight over the best finds. Discarded airplane food can spark some of
the fiercest fights. Whoever wins completely devours every bit of the
old, dry rolls, congealed meat, and overcooked pasta, even the
contents of the tiny tub of butter, before tossing the plastic
packaging onto the vast piles.

Miriam Nyambura shows the cuts on her fingers from sifting through
broken glass at the Dandora dump. Photo: Khadija Farah for The
Intercept

Traders who sit along the edges of the dump buy soda bottles made from
PET, or polyethylene terephthalate, which Miriam gathers seven days a
week, for less than 5 cents a kilogram — more than the cardboard
boxes she also picks off the heaps, but far less than what they’ll
pay for the same weight of metal cans. It can take many hours, even
days, to collect a kilo of plastic bottles. And the bags that can fit
them all, called _diblas_, are too big and unwieldy for children to
carry.

A local youth organization, Dandora HipHop City
[[link removed]], came up with a way for kids who live
near the dump and don’t have the strength or time to gather a whole
kilo of plastic to still get something for individual bottles and
other pieces of plastic they gather. At the group’s “bank
[[link removed]],” a storefront one
block from the dump, kids can earn points for even a single plastic
bottle, which they can then redeem for cooking oil, flour, vegetables,
and other essentials. The organization, which was founded by a hip-hop
artist who grew up nearby, also runs a youth program in a building on
the edge of the dump. Festooned with hand-painted art and furnished
with scavenged scraps that serve as chairs and sofas, the building
provides a place for the kids to compose music on old computers,
write, play games, and just pass the time.

But the small amount the group gets for collected plastic on the
informal market doesn’t cover the food it gives out through its
bank, so Dandora HipHop City has been using donations from its
employees and their friends to pay for its programs. The group
attempted to get a grant from Coca-Cola, which seemed like a perfect
corporate sponsor. Coke, which is valued at more than $200 billion,
sees Africa as “one of the core growth engines for the company going
forward,” as CEO James Quincey recently put it
[[link removed]].
And the children of Dandora, who suffer from hunger, neglect, and a
variety of health problems
[[link removed]] related
to the dump, clean up many of the company’s bottles — sometimes
gathering them when they should be in school.

Left/Top: Dandora HipHop City sits at the edge of the Dandora dump
site on Feb. 15, 2020. The youth-focused, community-based organization
serves as an an arts, technology, and entrepreneurship space that
combats unemployment in the area. Right/Bottom: Ramsizo Burguda works
on new music in the Dandora HipHop City studio.Photos: Khadija Farah
for The Intercept

In September 2018, Coke brought a delegation out to the dump to meet
with the youth organization. Charles Lukania, programs manager of
Dandora HipHop City, says that afterward, he sent a proposal and
budget to some of the Coca-Cola marketing staff who had visited
outlining how the company could support its bank project. But
the visit — and the proposal — didn’t lead to any funding.
Instead, “they offered to give us a fridge full of Coke the kids
could buy,” said Lukania, who noted that most of the children at the
dump can’t afford soda. “Whatever little money they have goes to
buy food.”

Later that month, the company partnered with the youth organization on
several cleanup
[[link removed]] days,
but those events didn’t involve any direct financial support either.
Instead, Coke’s contribution toward those collaborations was Coke,
the soft drink, which the volunteers were given only after they had
spent hours cleaning up garbage in the hot sun. “And all the
refreshments were in plastic bottles,” said Lukania.

In an emailed response to questions from The Intercept, Camilla
Osborne, head of Coca-Cola’s communications for southern and eastern
Africa, acknowledged that “our bottling partner Coca-Cola Beverages
Africa in Kenya provided hydration and recycling bins” at one of
Dandora HipHop City’s events. But, according to Osborne, “the
company and its bottling partners in Kenya are not aware of a specific
request for a grant from the group, and has not had any direct
engagement” with Dandora HipHop City.

Osborne’s email also noted that “No one organisation alone can
solve the world’s plastic problems.”

To be fair, Coke is just one of many companies that have foisted the
costs of cleaning up their products and packaging onto the public.
While Coke was the biggest source of plastic waste in both Africa and
the world, according to a 2019 global brand audit
[[link removed]] of
plastic waste, all sorts of companies that make plastic and use it for
packaging have left the public to deal with the expense of addressing
and preventing the harm caused by their products.

In the U.S., this externalizing of corporate costs has left
municipalities shouldering the collection, carting, and processing of
their plastic garbage. For decades, this burden was masked by the
export of some 70 percent of the waste to China. But since China
closed its doors to most U.S. plastic in 2018, some cities have found
that they don’t have the money to recycle and have abandoned
[[link removed]] the
practice, causing widespread inconvenience and a growing awareness of
the persistence of plastic.

In poor countries, which are now bearing a disproportionate burden of
the global plastics crisis
[[link removed]],
the calculus is different. While environmental outrage has constrained
markets in many wealthier nations and, after the coronavirus pandemic,
will likely cut further into the acceptability of plastics there, the
use of plastic and products packaged in it is still growing quickly
throughout Africa and elsewhere in the developing world. Meanwhile,
since China’s policy change on scrap plastic, the U.S., Australia,
and many European nations have been exporting their waste to other
countries that are far less able to deal with it. Without the
infrastructure to process the waste or the funds to fob it off on
others, the plastic has swamped these nations, filling waterways,
clogging roads and fields, and becoming intricately mixed into animal
feed. Plastics don’t biodegrade, so the tiny shreds will remain in
water, soil, and air for centuries.

While the plastics crisis has largely played out on the administrative
level in the U.S., burdening local governments with the growing costs
and logistics of managing plastic garbage, in developing countries
that have no government-funded waste collection or recycling systems,
those burdens fall on individuals. In Kenya, where some 18 million
people live on less than $1.90 per day, the responsibility offloaded
by some of the most profitable companies in the world falls to some of
the poorest individuals in the world, like Rosemary and her aunt. And
Kenya is just one of dozens of developing countries where plastic is
causing massive human rights and child labor problems, in addition to
environmental devastation.

Miriam Nyambura and her 11-year-old niece, Rosemary, collect discarded
cardboard boxes, paper, and plastic bottles at the Dandora dump on
Feb. 29, 2020. Nyambura picks an average of 20 kilograms of waste each
day. Photo: Khadija Farah for The Intercept

Dump, Dump, Burn

Even under the best of circumstances, plastic recycling doesn’t work
very well. Unlike glass, which can be repurposed infinitely, plastic
can be significantly worse for wear after being recycled just once.
“Every stage of post-use treatment degrades the functional quality
of the polymer,” Kenneth Geiser, emeritus professor at the
University of Massachusetts at Lowell, explained of the molecules that
make up various plastics. “Polymers generally lose strength,
stability, and moldability as the linear molecular bonds are severed
or broken during recycling processes,” said Geiser, who founded the
Center for Environmentally Appropriate Materials. All plastic contains
chemical additives, which affect its color, moldability, and other
attributes. And those chemicals further complicate the recycling
process. “So even if in the laboratory, a polymer can be remelted
and reformed, it is not so easily accomplished in actual practice.”

Wealthy countries fail to recycle the vast majority of their plastics,
a process that involves cleaning, sorting, and grinding it, then
turning the ground plastic into bits called flake, and ultimately
converting the flake into new products. In the U.S., the plastic
recycling rate peaked at 9.5 percent in 2014. But in developing
countries that lack infrastructure, the process is harder — and more
difficult to pay for. Throughout the world, the value of recycled
plastic is undercut by “virgin,” or newly produced plastic, which
is cheap both because of the low cost of the subsidized
[[link removed]] fossil
fuels used to make it and because its pricing doesn’t reflect the
cost of cleaning it up.

In Nigeria, a kilo of empty metal cans fetches 10 to 15 times what
scrap plastic does. In Zambia, “nobody will buy it,” said Michael
Musenga, director of the Children’s Environmental Health Foundation.
“People move it from one place to another and just burn it.”

In India, where there is little financial incentive to retrieve
plastic, the waste piles up quickly. A 75-foot tall heap of mixed
plastic and organic garbage known as Mount Pirana has risen near a
school in the western city of Ahmedabad. Every day, 4,000 tons of new
waste are added to the landfill, and children who live near it suffer
from headaches, nerve pain, respiratory problems, and cancers,
according to Mahesh Pandya, an environmental and human rights activist
who has been working with them.

A field alongside Samit Road in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where a group
of plastics traders gathers to collect waste to sell.Photos: Sharon
Lerner/The Intercept

On a patch of land near Samit Road in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Hala
Debeba and a group of his friends have been living on the thin profit
margins of recycled plastic for the past 10 months. As cars rush by
and goats snooze on the road’s median nearby, the traders buy
plastic bottles from waste-pickers, mostly women, who carry them in
giant bags balanced on their backs and heads. Debeba and his crew sort
them into even larger bags and sell those bundles to other traders,
who cart the bottles to recyclers in trucks. At each stage of the
informal economy, the profit margin is just a few cents more per kilo.
Working 10 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week, the young plastics
traders, who have named their business _gwadenyochi_, the Amharic
word for friends, earn enough to rent a shared room where they sleep
between shifts.

But the value of plastic is dropping here too. Even the most valuable
resin — a thick, clear plastic known as “Obama” — is losing
value. On good days, the durable plastic, which is kept in a special
red sack apart from the others, can fetch just over $1 per kilo. Like
the former president, who is beloved here for bringing people of
different races together, Obama, which is used to hold the bottles of
six-packs together, is seen as unifying. But both in the U.S. and
around the world, plastic is creating stark divisions over who should
be held accountable for the massive pollution it is causing.

The Great Divide

Two bills recently proposed in the U.S. Congress stake out the
distinctly different views on how to handle the plastic waste crisis.
One, the Save Our Seas Act 2.0, would use tax dollars to improve our
existing system of recycling and find uses for existing plastic waste.
The legislation also funds research into the possibility of using
recycled plastic to make cars and bridges. The bill, which was
introduced in June by Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan and passed the
Senate in January, is supported by the American Chemistry Council
[[link removed]],
the trade group that represents the manufacturers of the chemical
components of plastic.

The other bill
[[link removed]],
the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, which was introduced in the
Senate in February, approaches plastics from a different perspective.
Believing that “we cannot recycle our way out of this crisis using
the system we have in place,” the bill’s Democratic co-sponsors
[[link removed]],
Sen. Tom Udall and Rep. Alan Lowenthal, would instead shift the
responsibility for plastic waste onto manufacturers by creating a
nationwide container refund program, mandating a temporary pause on
the construction of new plastic production plants, and eliminating
certain “unnecessary single-use plastic products” starting in
2022. The bill includes measures meant to verify that U.S. plastic
waste isn’t being sent to other countries.

Even before the coronavirus crisis, the Udall bill — which the New
York Times described as a “long shot
[[link removed]]” in
early February — faced an uphill battle in Washington. Since the
pandemic began, the bill’s prospects have in many ways become
slimmer as industry has seized on the global emergency as an
opportunity to promote its products.

Rep. Alan Lowenthal speaks at a news conference for the Break Free
From Plastic Pollution Act on Feb. 11, 2020, in Washington, D.C.
Lawmakers, advocates, and concerned citizens spoke about the exploding
crisis of plastic pollution in the United States. Photo: Sarah
Silbiger/Getty Images

The Plastics Industry Association, a trade group representing
companies involved on all levels of plastics production, has supplied
[[link removed]] its
member companies with form letters
[[link removed]] requesting
that their businesses that make single-use plastics and other plastic
products be exempted from stay-at-home orders. “From drug packaging
to packaging for medical devices, as well as many of the medical
devices themselves, plastics are essential to ensuring the safety of
the healthcare workforce, patients and consumers,” the form letter
addressed to “[State or Local Official]” explains. “We ask that
you designate [Company] as ‘essential’ during this critical
time.”

In March, the plastics trade group wrote to Alex Azar, the secretary
of Health and Human Services, asking him to “make a public statement
on the health and safety benefits seen in single-use plastics.”

Meanwhile, Matt Seaholm, executive director of the American Recycled
Plastic Bag Alliance [[link removed]], a division of the
Plastics Industry Association that works to prevent and roll back bans
on plastic, has been tweeting
[[link removed]] articles and editorials from
the Wall Street Journal
[[link removed]], Forbes
[[link removed]], Fox
News
[[link removed]],
and other news outlets arguing that reusable shopping bags — or
“bug-breeding reusable grocery bags
[[link removed]],”
as the New York Post recently put it — are a health hazard during
the pandemic. While the coronavirus can also live on plastic, the
articles focus on grocery bags as a source of infection. Most cite
studies from a researcher named Ryan Sinclair, who provided an
affidavit the Plastics Industry Association sent to Azar attesting to
the threats posed by reusable grocery bags.

Sinclair has published three studies on the subject. One
[[link removed]],
from 2011, was funded by the American Chemistry Council. The others,
published in 2015 and 2018, were supported by an obscure
California-based group called the Environmental Safety Alliance, whose
secretary is a former gun lobbyist
[[link removed]] who believes
[[link removed]] that
laws should be based on the Bible. The organization has advocated
against the use of reusable shopping bags since at least 2012
[[link removed]]. Although
the 2018 study concludes that any threat of infection posed by
reusable grocery bags could be countered by hand-washing and public
education about the need to launder reusable bags, during the
pandemic the plastics industry has used it to argue that bag bans
should be rescinded. The petrochemical industry, which makes the
chemical components of plastic, is also exploiting the pandemic to ask
for the rollback of environmental regulations — and, in many cases,
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is complying
[[link removed]].

The Plastics Industry Association wrote to Health and Human Services
Secretary Alex Azar, asking him to “make a public statement on the
health and safety benefits seen in single-use plastics.”

Some industry pushback is also being seen in Europe, where a plastics
trade association
[[link removed]] recently
wrote to the European Commission asking it to lift all bans on
single-use plastic items and delay the implementation of a
continent-wide ban that is supposed to take effect in July 2021.
Industry has made similar requests in Turkey
[[link removed]], Germany
[[link removed]],
and Italy
[[link removed]].

Nevertheless, recently passed bans on single-use plastics in Europe
and Canada remain on track to take effect next year. And the plastics
industry’s opportunism has done little to reverse the wave of
anti-plastics legislation that has left at least 127 countries
[[link removed]] with
some kind of law limiting single-use plastics. The policy that is
expected to deliver the most substantial blow to worldwide plastics
demand — China
[[link removed]]’s ban on
certain single-use plastics — became law in January and is due to
take effect in Chinese cities by the end of this year.

In Africa, which leads the world
[[link removed]] in
plastics bans, more than three dozen laws now restrict the use of
plastics. Senegal’s recently passed ban on all water sachets and
plastic cups is due to take effect on April 20. In Kenya, a plastic
bag ban remains in place and is widely seen as a success. Since the
bill’s passage in 2017, the discarded bags that had previously blown
about in the streets, clogged streams, and hung from trees have all
but disappeared.

The Kenyan government also passed a ban on all single-use plastics,
including bottles, in national parks and protected areas, which is due
to go into effect in June. But protected areas only make up about 11
percent of the country and a broader ban on plastic bottles will be
more difficult, according to James Wakibia, a Kenyan photographer and
activist who pushed for the bag ban. Wakibia said he met with little
opposition in the four years he campaigned to ban plastic bags, but
expects a national bottle ban will elicit a different response from
beverage companies.

“The industry would not accept it,” said Wakibia. “Drinks in
plastic are a thriving business in Kenya, and almost all companies
have stopped using glass for plastic. They would go to any extent to
stop such ideas, going to court, paying critics, doing crazy marketing
and greenwashing in the name of conservation.”

In fact, shortly after Kenya’s National Environmental Management
Authority raised the prospect of a nationwide ban on plastic bottles
in January 2018, Coca-Cola, Unilever, and the Kenya Association of
Manufacturers announced the formation of PETCO, a company that
described itself as an effort of the Kenyan plastics industry to
“self-regulate” the recycling of PET plastics. The companies
undertook a similar effort with the same name in 2010, though it
stopped functioning the next year.

PETCO [[link removed]] has a green logo with the infamous
triangle of arrows to indicate sustainability and uses the tagline
“#do1thing. Recycle.” But it’s not an environmental
organization. PETCO has its offices at the Nairobi headquarters of
Coca-Cola, one of more than a dozen member companies. And although its
formation seems to have quieted talk of a nationwide plastic bottle
ban for now, it has clearly not fixed the plastic waste problem. PET
bottles that used to hold Coke and other beverages can still be seen
littered throughout the country — and projects that intended to use
recycled PET plastic report
[[link removed]] not
having enough of the material. That may be because PETCO provided only
$385,400 in subsidies for the plastic recycling market in 2019, not
enough to make the collection and processing of the plastic waste
worthwhile, even for some impoverished Kenyans.

Joyce Wanjiru, country manager for PETCO Kenya, said the company’s
subsidies have “cushioned recyclers in the market significantly,
allowing them to produce flakes and pellets that allows their product
to be competitive internationally.” Wanjiru also noted that, during
the coronavirus crisis, some of PETCO’s member companies have been
providing face masks, hand sanitizer, and food vouchers to
waste-pickers in Kenya, whom she referred to as “wastepreneurs.”

Mwangi Mboya overlooks the hills of the Dandora dump in Nairobi,
Kenya. “I grew up here,” he said. “These people are my
family.” Photo: Khadija Farah for The Intercept

The 1 Percent Solution

The decision to put PETCO forward as a force for environmental good
— and a voluntary solution that could preempt binding legislation
— parallels the global strategy the plastics industry has taken in
response to a growing awareness of the plastics crisis. Last year,
major companies involved in plastics manufacturing, including BASF,
Chevron Phillips Chemical Company LLC, Covestro, Dow Chemical, Exxon
Mobil, and Formosa Plastics, formed the Alliance to End Plastic Waste.
The group has pledged $1.5 billion toward ending the flow of plastic
waste into the environment, an impressive amount until you realize
that the corporate commitment is a mere 1 percent of the
estimated $150 billion
[[link removed]] it
will cost to clean plastics from the seas.

And that $150 billion just covers the oceans. In addition to the more
than 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic already produced, the industry
now churns out an additional 380 million tons a year — roughly the
weight of all of humanity — which ends up in all sorts of waterways,
as well as in air, soil, and human bodies. The average person
replenishes our internal plastics burden by eating some 2,000 tiny
microplastic pieces each week, which, taken together, have roughly the
same weight as a credit card
[[link removed]].
While much remains to be learned about the effects of this plastic
within us, low doses of some of the chemicals in plastic can affect
[[link removed]] human development,
reproduction, and health.

The Alliance to End Plastic Waste did not respond to inquiries from
The Intercept for this article.

Last April, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Unilever, and the beverage company
Diageo launched an Africa-specific corporate group to counter the
crisis. The Africa Plastics Recycling Alliance, whose members also
include the South African food company Promisador, aims to “turn the
current challenge of plastic waste in Sub Saharan Africa into an
opportunity to create jobs and commercial activity by improving the
collection and recycling of plastics,” according to a press release
[[link removed]].
Media contacts listed for the alliance did not respond to specific
questions from The Intercept about how much money member companies
were spending to support it and what projects they were undertaking.
But it’s worth noting that even before the giant brands joined
forces, their financial power vastly outstripped that of local
environmental groups — and even the governments of the countries
where they operate. The valuations of both Coca-Cola and Nestlé, the
two biggest companies in the alliance, are far greater than the budget
of any single African nation.

“It’s money invested in maintaining the license to pollute.”

Critics deride the plastics industry’s small contributions toward
cleaning up plastic while continuing to make far grander expenditures
to protect its businesses. “It’s money invested in maintaining
the license to pollute,” David Azouley, environmental health program
director at the Center for International Environmental Law, said of
the Alliance to End Plastic Waste. “What would you think of someone
who said, ‘I’m giving you a coin to clean your garden, and in
exchange I’m going to spend 250 bucks putting garbage into your
garden’? Nobody would go for it.”

Advocates working on plastics in poor countries say they have little
choice but to live with the dictates set by the big beverage
companies. While supporting both the global and African alliances,
Coca-Cola announced [[link removed]] at
the World Economic Forum in Davos in January that the company would
continue to use plastic bottles. Although outrage about the
company’s plastic waste has erupted worldwide over the past few
years, Bea Perez, head of sustainability for Coke, said that switching
from plastic could alienate customers, affect sales, and drive up the
company’s carbon footprint. Perez offered no evidence for her
claims. And whether they’re true or not, with her pronouncement,
which Perez made while expressing her respect for young anti-plastic
straw activists, Coke gave itself the green light to continue pumping
out plastic. According to its own data
[[link removed]],
the company made 117 billion plastic bottles in 2018, roughly 200,000
a minute.

Betterman Simidi Musasia acknowledged that as a working man who lives
in a small town about 40 miles north of Nairobi, he has little chance
of influencing the corporate giants that create most of the plastic
pollution. “When you’re going against organizations like
Coca-Cola, things are already stacked against you,” said Musasia,
who is 39 and founded an organization called Clean Up Kenya
[[link removed]] in
2015. He earns nothing for his environmental work, which sprang from
his disgust over the “unimaginable” amounts of plastic trash in
his town. In fact, Musasia funds the organization with his modest
earnings from his small business and, between the two, often works
more than 60 hours a week.

In addition to leading garbage cleanups and teaching Kenyan children
how to responsibly deal with their waste, Clean Up Kenya has taken
some difficult stances on plastics, advocating for a national bottle
ban [[link removed]],
criticizing the bottled water industry as “a scam,” and calling
attention to the injustice
[[link removed]] of
locating dumps in poor neighborhoods. The group’s recommendation
that companies take responsibility for their own waste has proven
particularly incendiary. Musasia and his colleagues recently expressed
their support for a national deposit system for plastic bottles when
they met with representatives of several beverage companies. But the
industry representatives not only rejected their idea, several
responded with veiled threats.

“They told us that, for our own good, we need to stop our
campaign,” said Musasia, who nevertheless remains committed to the
uphill battle against plastic. “The more people around the world
know this, the more Coca-Cola and the other companies will be forced
to act responsibly.”

A Coca-Cola ad on the wall of a restaurant in Northern Kenya. Photo:
Sharon Lerner/The Intercept

Same Company, Same Plastic

In February, at a sustainability conference in Brussels, Coca-Cola
executive Bruno Van Gompel made an encouraging presentation
[[link removed]] about
plastic. Van Gompel, who works on the company’s supply chain,
pledged that Coke would collect all of its packaging in Western
Europe. But Coca-Cola has yet to commit to collecting all its
packaging in African countries or any other part of the developing
world. Coke did not respond to a question about why it has not
made the same promise in other parts of the world, but noted that
its 2018 pledge
[[link removed]] to
collect and recycle the equivalent of every bottle or can the company
sells globally by 2030 and make all of its packaging recyclable by
2025 applies to all countries.

Waste collection is not the only plastics-related issue that the
multinational beverage company handles differently in different parts
of the globe. Although Coke has a long history of opposing bottle
bills
[[link removed]],
Van Gompel said that it will now support “well-designed deposit
return schemes where a proven alternative does not exist.” But Coke
has opposed a national bottle return system in Kenya and anywhere else
in Africa. In her email, Osborne, the Coke spokesperson, confirmed
that the company does not believe a container deposit system is
appropriate for Kenya and said that it believes that PETCO is the
right model for the country.

“Not all countries have the right pre-conditions for a successful”
container deposit scheme, Osborne wrote. “We believe that under the
wrong conditions, a deposit scheme can not only negatively affect the
retail environment and frustrate consumers, but also potentially
undermine existing recycling value chains by removing high value items
like PET bottles and aluminum cans.” She also noted that “we
currently participate in fair, industry-led deposit schemes in nearly
40 markets around the world.”

In truth, Coke has given only grudging support to the laws that
require beverage companies to tack a charge onto the price of their
drink to be refunded after it is returned. While Osborne noted the
company’s support for bottle bills in “several U.S. states,” the
company has a long history of opposing
[[link removed]] them
throughout the country. Coke endorsed a Scottish bottle deposit plan
in 2017, though only after Greenpeace released a leaked document
[[link removed]] showing
that the company had fought against it for years.

In Australia, Coca-Cola eventually backed a container deposit law in
the Northern Territory, but first sued
[[link removed]] to
stop it. The national beverage industry trade group, to which Coke
belongs, also lobbied hard against the plans. In one sense, Coke has
lost the war against container deposit schemes, which have recently
been set up in New South Wales, Australian Capital Territory, and
Western Australia. While the implementation of Western Australia’s
container deposit plan has been delayed because of the coronavirus,
Coca-Cola now has a hand
[[link removed]] in
running all of those programs.

Beverage companies may be averse to implementing these systems
globally because of the cost, according to waste experts. “There are
so many bottles lying around that if they instituted a real bottle
refund system, it would be a huge unfunded liability,” said Usman
Valiante, a senior policy analyst at the Circular Economy Lab in
Canada, who dismissed Van Gompel’s pledge to a change of tune on
bottle bills as “PR bluster.” “If there’s a 5-cent return,
multiply that by billions and billions of bottles, and it instantly
becomes billions of dollars. They say they want to meet these targets,
but if they were really to make a meaningful effort, they would have
to set up a reverse supply chain, which would mean employing people
and building facilities, and they’re not up for any of that.”

Valiante predicted that beverage companies won’t quit plastic unless
they’re forced to. “It’s extremely cheap to produce and use,”
he said. For Coca-Cola, which has systematically dismantled the
network of local companies that used to refill and distribute glass
bottles as it has phased in single-use plastic, he said, the shift has
had an added benefit. “Typically these bottlers were not only
bottling Coke, but also local soda brands,” Valiante said. “When
they went out of business, the local brands they were making were also
eliminated. They killed their competition.”

Osborne insisted that Coke has not dismantled its African network of
bottlers. On the contrary, she wrote, “many of The Coca-Cola
Company’s (TCCC) bottling partners have been consolidated into
Africa’s largest bottler, Cola-Cola Beverages Africa (CCBA), the
eight largest Coca-Cola bottling partner worldwide.”

Although in his presentation in Brussels, Van Gompel promised that
Coke would soon begin “exploring” refillable options, the company
already knows well about these options, having pioneered them. In many
rural parts of the developing world, the old signature fluted glass
Coke bottles are still in use. In her email, Coca-Cola’s Osborne
said that refillable bottles already make up half or more of sales
in over 25 countries, though she included plastic bottles, such as
those the company recently introduced in South Africa
[[link removed]], in
that figure.

Yet without intervention, Valiente warned, the company may succeed in
getting rid of refillable, glass bottles. “If governments don’t
bring in some mandates soon to use refillable containers, they will
all go the way of the dodo bird pretty quickly,” he said.

Plastic waste covers the banks of the Nairobi River on Feb. 15, 2020.
Though the river is polluted, it is used by residents of low-income
settlements as a source of water for cleaning, bathing, and watering
crops. Photo: Khadija Farah for The Intercept

U.S. to the Rescue

So great is the public outrage over the global plastics problem that
even the Trump administration, notorious for prioritizing business
over the environment, recently began to try to address it. In
November, on his last day as secretary of energy, Rick Perry announced
a U.S. initiative to deal with plastic waste. Perry was stepping down
after his efforts in Ukraine to cement a deal over natural gas
[[link removed]] — the primary
fuel used to make plastic — ensnared him in the impeachment inquiry
into Donald Trump. His parting program, the “Plastics Innovation
Challenge
[[link removed]],”
would provide Department of Energy grants to American companies that
have innovative ideas for addressing the plastics crisis. But if
Americans could solve the problem, Perry insisted, they shouldn’t be
blamed for it.

“I think there are like eight rivers in the world where close to 90
percent of the waste is going into the oceans,” Perry said on a
press call. “None are American rivers.” He was referring to
a 2017 study [[link removed]] that
has become a favorite of the plastics industry. Published in
Environmental Science and Technology, the study did indeed show that
just 10 rivers — eight in Asia and two in Africa — transport
between 88 and 95 percent of the global plastics load into the sea.

But what Perry failed to note is that much of the plastic that has
accumulated in these rivers originated in the U.S. and Europe — as
did the products that were encased in it. Some 172 metric tons of
plastics and its chemical components worth $285 billion were imported
into 33 African countries between 1990 and 2017, according to a study
[[link removed]] published
last year in Environmental Sciences Europe. And brand audits have
repeatedly found Coke and Pepsi, quintessential American brands, among
the top polluters
[[link removed]] in
the world.

Even Christian Schmidt, the author of the study Perry cited, doesn’t
think his research exonerates the producers of the plastic. “The big
companies are not off the hook,” said Schmidt, who is based in
Germany. While his research did indeed find massive plastic pollution
in 10 rivers in Asia and Africa, including the Mekong, Indus, Yangtze,
Yellow, Nile, and Niger, “they can’t say it’s just a local
problem over there,” said Schmidt, who added that he felt “there
should be increased producer responsibility” in Africa, as there is
increasingly in Europe.

Regardless of the plastic’s origins, the Department of Energy, which
did not respond to requests for comment, clearly sees the fact that it
has wound up in rivers, oceans, and landfills as yet another business
opportunity for American companies. As one department official put it,
“While this is a problem largely not of America’s creation, we
believe American leadership can play a big role in the solution.”
For his part, Perry described the grant program as an opportunity
“to work with other countries on some challenges they have.”

In February, the department announced
[[link removed]] that it
would be partnering with the American Chemistry Council on the
program. The trade group represents Dow, BASF, Chevron Phillips
Chemical Company LLC, Exxon Mobil Chemical Company, LyondellBasell,
and many of the other big multinational corporations that helped
create the plastics problem the program aims to solve. Among the
purposes for which the government grants can be used is the production
of new plastic. While the funding announcement
[[link removed]] specified
that the Energy Department would be looking for proposals to create
new “recyclable” plastic, much of the plastic pollution in the
ocean that the department is trying to address is — in theory
[[link removed]],
if not in practice
[[link removed]] —
also recyclable.

For close watchers of the global plastics crisis, there is a bitter
irony to the positioning of both poor countries as the cause of the
plastics crisis and the U.S. as their savior. “We send them this
garbage and then we’re going to turn around and say, ‘Look at
these people, they can’t even manage their plastic,’” said
Azouley of the Center for International Environmental Law. “And now
these same people are coming in and saying, ‘Oh, you have a problem?
Let us give you a technological solution that we own, that we patent,
and that you’re going to have to borrow money to put in place.’”

Scavengers working amid a leak of methane gas at the Bantar Gebang
landfill in Jakarta, Indonesia, on March 23, 2017. Photo: Edy
Susanto/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

A Burning Problem

While the U.S. and the American Chemistry Council have focused on
recycling as the solution, the repurposing and recycling of plastics
can be particularly dangerous in the developing world. In Cameroon,
plastic trash is melted into a sludge, which is then mixed with sand
and used to pave roads, according to Gilbert Kuepouo, coordinator of
the Cameroonian environmental group Research and Education Center for
Development. While the Cameroonian Ministry of the Environment
promotes the practice as environmentally friendly, the plastic is
melted in “open air” and releases both greenhouse gases and toxic
chemicals, according to Kuepouo.

Yuyun Ismawati, a senior adviser at Nexus3 Foundation, has similar
concerns about the recycling of plastics in Indonesia. Ismawati
visited a few plastics recycling plants near the Bantar Gebang
landfill in Jakarta and worries about what she described as “poor
conditions” there. “Some of the people work with minimal
protections considering how many chemicals are involved. And some of
the women told me they have problems with headaches and irregular
menstruation,” said Ismawati. “There were so many fumes in that
factory. My eyes and throat hurt when I was there.”

Meanwhile, the outright burning of plastic, while even more dangerous
than melting it for recycling, is the primary disposal method in many
countries. While some 41 percent of waste is openly burned around the
world, in certain African cities as much of 75 percent of garbage is
disposed of this way. The international climate group G20 calls the
practice, which exacerbates climate change and creates toxic and
cancer-causing air pollution and ash, a “global health disaster
[[link removed]].”

Tests done in Agbogbloshie, a neighborhood in the Ghanaian capital of
Accra, give us a window into how easily the chemicals produced by
burning plastic can make their way into food. Agbogbloshie is the
final destination for much of the estimated 40 million tons of
electronic waste the world produces every year. The scrapyard, which
sits next to a lagoon near the city center, has been celebrated as the
perfect market-driven solution to waste. And it’s true that the
traders there find ways to repurpose obsolete computers, TVs, and
other electronics that are considered trash in the U.S. But cables,
wires, and other plastic bits of these products that are deemed
unusable are burned in Agbogbloshie. And eggs laid by chickens that
forage nearby contained the second-highest level of brominated dioxins
ever measured, according to the International Pollution Elimination
Network, which performed the tests last year. The chemicals can harm
developing fetuses, disrupt the functioning the immune and endocrine
systems, and cause cancer. IPEN also found
[[link removed]] extremely
high levels of the flame retardants HBCD and PBDEs in the eggs at
Agbogbloshie and measured these same chemicals in eggs sampled near
medical waste incinerators in Accra and Yaoundé, the capital of
Cameroon.

Malaysian officials and journalists inspect containers filled with
plastic waste shipment in Port Klang, Malaysia, on May 28, 2019,
before the containers are sent back to their country of origin. Photo:
Mohd Rasfan/AFP via Getty Images

The Plastic Waste “Trade”

While developing countries are struggling to deal with their mounting
garbage, the U.S. is adding to their burden by exporting massive
amounts of plastic trash that it can’t process to nations that have
even less ability to properly dispose of it. In 2019, American
exporters shipped almost 1.5 billion pounds of plastic waste to 95
countries, including Malaysia, which received more than 133 million
pounds; Thailand, which got sent almost 60 million pounds; and
Mexico, which got 81 million pounds, according to the most recent
data [[link removed]]. Ghana, Uganda,
Tanzania, South Africa, Ethiopia, Senegal, and Kenya were among the
African countries that also received American plastic garbage, most
of which was the hardest to recycle and the least-valued plastics. The
United States categorizes all of this exported plastic as
“recycled,” even though extensive reporting and on-site
investigations
[[link removed]] have shown
that much of it is either dumped or burned.

The large-scale international shipment of plastic trash from rich to
poor countries is often described as the “global waste trade,” but
it doesn’t work like a typical trade. Because the value of scrap
plastic is so low, these days many businesses that receive it are
being paid rather than paying to get the stuff. The small opportunity
for income it provides has made it difficult to stop the imports.
India passed a ban on the import of scrap plastic in 2018, for
instance. But implementation of the ban has been delayed twice. And in
the meantime, the U.S. has sent the country at least 188 million
pounds of its plastic garbage.

Jamaica also receives American plastic waste — more than 100,000
pounds last year. And that’s just what’s in the official record.
An unknown amount of U.S. garbage enters the country in other ways,
including under the guise of humanitarian aid, according to Sherika
Whitelocke-Ballingsingh, who has been a public health inspector in
Jamaica and now works for the Caribbean Poison Information Network.
“Charitable groups will send shipping containers marked as aid, but
when you open up the containers, sometimes only maybe 10 percent of
what’s inside is usable. The rest of it is garbage,” said
Whitelocke-Ballingsingh. “I’ve had to arrange to get these things
to the dump myself.”

“If recycling is so great, such an environmental good, why don’t
developed countries do it there?”

Several countries have been trying to stem the tide of plastic garbage
that has swelled since China stopped receiving it in 2018. In
September, Cambodia returned
[[link removed]] 83
shipping containers full of waste to the U.S. and Canada with a
message from Prime Minister Hun Sen: “Cambodia is not a dustbin.”
In January, Malaysia sent more than 8 million pounds
[[link removed]] of
plastic trash back to the U.S. and 12 other rich nations. And in
Indonesia, a customs official announced
[[link removed]] last
year that hundreds
[[link removed]] of
shipping containers, many of which had been incorrectly labeled to
mask the fact that they contained plastic waste, were being sent back
to their “countries of origin,” including the U.S.

But returning garbage to sender turns out to be incredibly difficult.
A closer look shows that, instead of being sent back to the U.S., many
of the shipping containers from Indonesia were instead shipped to
other poor countries, including India, Thailand, and Vietnam,
according to a report
[[link removed]] by
the Nexus3 Foundation, which has been tracking the situation. And
more than 1,000 of the seized shipping containers remain in the port
of Jakarta, according to Nexus3’s Ismawati, who is particularly
concerned that the remaining waste will also be hard to repatriate and
may wind up in poor countries. “Somebody somewhere will always be
willing to accept some money for crap,” she said.

To Ismawati, all the waste moving into Indonesia and throughout the
developing world belies the notion that recycling can solve the
plastics problem. “If recycling is so great, such an environmental
good, why don’t developed countries do it there?” she asked. “If
you’re so advanced that you can send rockets to the moon, why
can’t you build recycling plants in your own countries?”

A neighborhood dump site in Kawangware, a low-income neighborhood in
Nairobi, Kenya. Photo: Khadija Farah for The Intercept

The Exploding Balloon

As much as plastics are already causing a worldwide garbage fight, the
real battle has yet to come, according to Jim Puckett, who tracks the
international movement of waste as executive director of the Basel
Action Network. “It’s a balloon that’s going to explode,” he
said of the international tensions over plastic trash. “All the
brokers are trying to find the next country that’s going to take
this stuff. We’re talking about massive amounts of waste, just
mountains and mountains of material. And you can’t hold it on
tarmacs forever.” While the plastic mounts, so too does the pressure
to stop its import. “Once people start to see and smell it and
realize it’s being burned in their backyards, they say no way,”
Puckett said.

Last May, that pressure increased when representatives of 187
countries gathered in Geneva for a meeting of the Basel Convention.
The U.S. is one of a tiny handful of countries that have not joined or
signed that international treaty, which governs hazardous waste, but
an American delegation attended the meeting anyway along with
representatives of the American Chemistry Council. A major amendment
was on the agenda that could severely limit the ability to export
plastic waste to member countries, which make up most of the world. If
it passed, it could put an end to the shipping containers full of
mixed plastic the U.S. has been sending abroad for decades.

The conference was extended by several days to allow the countries to
negotiate the contentious amendment. Even with the extra time, the
debates went on well into the night, with the U.S. and the American
Chemistry Council arguing against it through the Argentinian
delegation and almost all of the remaining members supporting it.
Treaty negotiations are usually somber affairs where policy
pronouncements are met with respectful silence. But when the president
of the conference, Abraham Zivayi Matiza, announced the unanimous
passage of the plastic amendment after several days of near-nonstop
negotiations, “the room was filled with thunderous applause,” said
Joe DiGangi, a senior science adviser to IPEN who attended the
meeting.

Not everyone was happy. After the vote, DiGangi wound up riding the
elevator with a lawyer who was representing the plastics industry at
the meeting. “He looked at me, shook his head, and said, ‘You guys
just restructured the entire plastics trade.’”

While it’s still unclear what consequences U.S. companies will
suffer if they choose to continue sending their plastic waste abroad,
the quick passage of the Basel amendment signals that we’ve reached
a new stage in the international war over plastic, in which most
countries see the need for urgent action. It usually takes many years,
sometimes decades, to hammer out international environmental treaties,
but the Basel amendment on plastic, which will take effect in January
2021, passed less than a year after it was first proposed. “I’ve
never seen any international agreement move as fast as that
amendment,” said Puckett.

A goat walks on broken glass in the Dandora dump in Nairobi on Feb.
15, 2020. Photo: Khadija Farah for The Intercept

The urgency that fueled the quick action on the treaty is now
dovetailing with unprecedented economic disruption caused by the
coronavirus pandemic. And some predict the combination will put an end
to the steep increases of plastics production. While unabated growth
has gone on for decades, before the pandemic, the industry was
planning to significantly ramp up its usual expansion. In February,
the American Chemistry Council announced
[[link removed]] more
than $200 billion
[[link removed]] in
investments in new infrastructure for the production of plastics and
petrochemicals. In Africa, the amount of plastics and polymers that
will become plastic products imported from the U.S. and other
countries was recently predicted to double by 2030.

But that trajectory has changed, according to Carroll Muffett,
president and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law.
“Industry had already recognized that its assumptions about how
plastic would grow were wildly optimistic,” said Muffett, who
pointed to coronavirus-related delays
[[link removed]] in
the construction of new plastics and chemical plants, an increase in
bankruptcies
[[link removed]] among
fracking companies, and unprecedented drops
[[link removed]] in fossil
fuel production as evidence that the industry is now headed for
further trouble.

Even the industry’s promotion of plastics as a tool to fight the
pandemic won’t prevent its inevitable contraction, according to
Muffett. “Will they exploit this to pitch more expansion under the
guise of consumer hygiene? Certainly. But will that be enough to
offset the declining acceptance of plastic combined with the
instability of the entire petroleum sector? I don’t think so.”

It’s too soon to know whether Muffett is right. And, in any case, if
it comes to pass, a contraction of the plastics industry will play out
over years and decades. In the meantime, Africa is bracing for the
coronavirus, which, like the plastics crisis, will affect that
continent differently than it has the rest of the world. In Kenya,
which had just under 300 confirmed coronavirus infections as of
press time, many do not have the reserves to survive while on
lockdown. Panic about food has already led to a stampede in one
Nairobi slum. Last week, as the number of cases ticked upward, the
country suspended foreign travel and schools. Still, at the Dandora
dump, men, women, and children could be seen fanned out over the vast
piles of garbage last week, sorting through the trash with their bare
hands. Although the government made face masks mandatory, many of the
waste-pickers weren’t wearing them. Whether because they couldn’t
find them or couldn’t afford to buy them, they were risking both
arrest and contagion so they could earn enough to survive.

SHARON LERNER is an investigative reporter for The Intercept, covering
health and the environment. Her Intercept series, The Teflon Toxin,
was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Her work has also
appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, and the Washington Post,
among other publications, and has received awards from the Society for
Environmental Journalists, the American Public Health Association, the
Park Center for Independent Media, the Women and Politics Institute,
and the Newswoman’s Club of New York.

WAIT! BEFORE YOU GO on about your day, ask yourself: How likely is it
that the story you just read would have been produced by a different
news outlet if The Intercept hadn’t done it? Consider what the world
of media would look like without The Intercept. Who would hold party
elites accountable to the values they proclaim to have? How many
covert wars, miscarriages of justice, and dystopian technologies would
remain hidden if our reporters weren’t on the beat? The kind of
reporting we do is essential to democracy, but it is not easy, cheap,
or profitable. The Intercept is an independent nonprofit news outlet.
We don’t have ads, so we depend on our members — 35,000 and
counting — to help us hold the powerful to account. Joining is
simple and doesn’t need to cost a lot: You can become a sustaining
member for as little as $3 or $5 a month. That’s all it takes to
support the journalism you rely on.

Become a member
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]