As a university university student strolling to class, Mr. Wakibia, now 37, employed to pass a noxious landfill in Nakuru, Kenya’s fourth-premier urban region. The stench and the plastic particles that spilled into the street, he stated, prompted him to act.
He began campaigning, mainly on social media, for the ban, and his plea soon attained traction across a country inundated with plastic. Bags were being all over the place — in the air, clinging to trees, clogging waterways and producing flooding.
With powerful general public backing, a ban on plastic bags took outcome in 2017, and it has teeth: Any person caught breaking the regulation could facial area jail time. This calendar year, the govt followed up by banning other kinds of single-use plastic, which includes bottles and straws, in countrywide parks and other secured locations.
“We have accomplished one thing,” Mr. Wakibia mentioned of the bag ban. “But we ought to not prevent because there is so substantially air pollution going on.”
Kenya isn’t the only region using measures to curb plastics. A recent report by the United Nations counted 127 nations around the world with guidelines on the books to regulate or restrict use.
In reaction, the sector has attempted to handle the plastics situation. The Alliance to Close Plastic Squander — shaped by oil giants like Exxon Mobil and Chevron, as effectively as chemical organizations like Dow — previous 12 months pledged $1.5 billion to struggle plastic air pollution. That figure, critics issue out, is a smaller portion of what the market has invested in plastic infrastructure.
Producers “say they will handle plastic squander, but we say plastic alone is the dilemma,” Mr. Ochieng stated. “An exponential advancement in plastics creation is just not a thing we can deal with.”
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