Despite pioneering a ban, Kenya is drowning in single-use plastic!

Professional ragpickers do hard work at the trash areas. They do so at the dawn. They trudged over hills of rancid waste at the Dandora landfill. It is situated on the eastern outskirts of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. They dig through freshly discarded refuse. They also segregate plastic bottles and deposit them into separate bags. Afterwards, they sell onto ‘collectors’ who are positioned around the dumpsite.

Kenya banned the law that says, single-use plastic bags. It was done in 2017, but there are still no laws requiring corporations that profit from single-use plastic bottles to clean up what they produce. Collectors stand at the entrance of the landfill, supervising their teams or groups who further separate plastic bottles by the colour– white in one heap, blue in another, clear in another and so on. After that, they sell on to an aggregator who then sells the waste on to recyclers.

Data source: Al Jazeera