Africa, it’s fair to say, has long struggled with serious garbage issues but a plastic bags ban won’t fix Africa’s waste problem. The South African Department of Environmental Affairs (DEA) found in 2011 that its citizens generated around 108 million tonnes of waste between them, 90% of which went directly to landfill or open dumps.
Given that these upsetting numbers were being generated in the immediate aftermath of the international Trafigura oil waste scandal that repeatedly dominated international environmental headlines between 2006-2010, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Africa’s ongoing trash management issues might’ve reached their nadir in recent years
But in fact, according to newly released figures from the Gauteng Provincial Government, the total mass of annual waste produced in SA had actually risen to 111 million tonnes in 2017 – with 75% of that still routinely being disposed in landfills and open pits.
Finding a workable solution for the growing issue of responsible waste management is far from an exclusively African problem, of course.
Indeed, although the Trafigura affair impacted mainly on the Ivory Coast, the actual dumping was being done by a Dutch multinational. On a smaller scale, current reports from the UK find that illegal dumping rose for a third consecutive year in 2016. It’s fast becoming a truly global concern, and one which has seen a rapid rise in the number and range of campaigns aimed at promoting responsible waste management in many countries around the world.
Africa is no exception here, of course – although some of the factors compounding the problem in many of its regions are all too familiar issues for the continent.
Unplanned growth is a major factor
When it comes to environmentally hazardous waste build-up, chief amongst those factors is the devastating effect of increasing urbanisation.
As the aforementioned DEA report states, ‘South Africa and its major metropolitan municipalities are facing one of their biggest challenges as more and more people come to live in cities, putting a strain on infrastructure and service delivery in terms of solid waste management.’
This sort of urban drift only worsens problems that have existed for years in various African countries.
Where other nations have been routinely shipping vast quantities of junk electronics to landfill in places like Ghana and Liberia for decades, poverty and lack of infrastructure in some of the worst-affected urban areas has seen rudimentary economies spring up around the trash mountains: entrepreneurial locals habitually risk their own health and perpetuate the damaging cycle by sifting the toxic, burning detritus for items they can reuse or (more commonly) resell.
As more and more people in Africa move towards major conurbations, the problem is also compounded at the other end of the financial scale – rising per capita incomes lead directly to an increase in waste volume, which is precisely why those DEA numbers for South Africa have continued to swell since 2011.
The same has been happening in Nigeria, and several other African nations where large urban centres have started to enjoy major financial upswings of late. Speaking at October’s high-profile Abuja Waste Summit, Dr. Oyelayo Adekiya noted that estimated waste generation rates in Nigeria currently equal around half a kilo per person, per day. Of that, around 70% is typically of high organic and biodegraded content – which is relevant, as we’ll see.
Mirroring the situation in South Africa and various other locations, collection and proper disposal at many Nigerian landfill sites is not currently engineered to a sufficient degree. The reasons behind this, said Dr. Adekiya, owe much to rapid urbanisation: unplanned neighbourhood growth creates sprawling slum communities struggling with non-existent waste collection, where trash quickly accumulates in drainage channels and alongside roadways.
Such poorly implemented waste management systems create ‘serious environmental and health problems’, she added. Open dumpsites lead to a concentration of both insect and vermin disease vectors, as well as creating fire hazards, localised flooding, damaging greenhouse gas build-up and significant problems for air quality.
Short-term fixes: more harm than good?
Naturally, a better infrastructure is the most obvious and urgent need for improving Africa’s ongoing waste management situation. But, as many of the nation’s leading socialists and environmentalists agree, more intensive and widespread community education is also key.
What seems to be less useful (and even downright controversial among many experts) are the seemingly knee-jerk measures being put in place to paper over the cracks left by this lack of educational and structural focus.
For example, Africa has proven itself extremely keen to join the global clamp-down on disposable plastic bags in recent months. Ostensibly this is a very good thing, of course – but only if it’s backed by the provision of some genuinely sustainable alternatives.
Banning Plastic Bags
The fact remains that plastic bags account for a relatively tiny fraction of Africa’s colossal landfill dilemma (hence Dr. Adekiya highlighting the predominantly organic content of Nigeria’s skyrocketing waste production), and intensive manufacture of paper or cloth alternatives can ultimately be worse for the environment in the long-term.
Increased education, of course, comes second to increased funding. Unfortunately, when the subject is as unglamorous as waste disposal, that’s always difficult to campaign for on any continent – especially so in Africa, where the race to make visible environmental strides on the global stage has repeatedly meant that faster, easier, trendier measures (such as plastic bags banning) have often taken precedence lately.
However, signs do suggest there’s an increasing acknowledgment of the need for a more structured and cohesive solution.
Since 2005, the World Bank has supported the solid waste sector in Burkina Faso with over $67 million in loans – as a direct result, capital city Ouagdougou now collects 78% of its citizens’ urban waste, as opposed to the average of just 46% across Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole. Meanwhile in Liberia, $10.5 million has been steered into new sanitary landfill and transfer stations, along with improvements to waste collection services.
Rather than shipping yet more waste to African shores, the rest of the world would do well to approach waste management from a suitably global perspective.
As Bloomberg noted in the wake of Ethiopia’a Reppi dump tragedy earlier this year, huge open garbage mountains don’t just pose an immediate threat to the lives of local communities: greenhouse gases, disease, water pollution and loss of biodiversity are just some of the reasons why global solid-waste management is predicted to become a $376 billion problem by 2025.
