Stop Banning Plastic Bags, Please

SEATTLE (Waste Advantage): In Africa, the plastic shopping bag is an endangered species. Last week, tiny Benin became the latest African country to restrict the import, production and even use of such bags. It’s not messing around, either. Following in the steps of Rwanda (where plastic bag importers are publicly shamed) and Kenya (where bags users can be subject to four years in jail), Benin plans to fine bag importers as much as $87,000.

That may well reduce the supply of plastic bags. But it ignores the larger problem. Plastic bags are just the most tangible symptoms of Africa’s inability to collect and dispose of its surging volumes of garbage. It’s a looming crisis that worsens every major environmental challenge facing the continent, including climate change, habitat destruction and a lack of clean water. Solving it will require much more than a crackdown on bags.

By weight and volume, plastic bags make up a very small percentage of the world’s waste. But in Africa, their visual impact is outsized. On a recent trip to Cotonou, Benin’s capital, I saw them clogging drains and sewers, stuck in fences, scattered across beaches, and littered all over the dirt roads of the city’s famed Dantokpa market. Similar scenes can be found across the continent, where plastic bags have become synonymous with the small-scale commerce that’s driving Africa’s economic growth.

In an ideal world, those bags would be dropped in trash cans, collected by garbage trucks, and disposed of in landfills, incinerators, or recycling plants. But in sub-Saharan Africa, only 46 percent of urban garbage is collected on average. Cotonou has no modern, environmentally sound landfills, and struggles to find contractors to pick up any trash at all. In the absence of formal collection and disposal, dangerous informal dumps have proliferated. Such dumps provide a breeding ground for disease, contribute to contaminated groundwater, and emit potent greenhouse gases that worsen climate change.

Banning plastic bags won’t solve any of these problems. In fact, it could arguably worsen things. Studies dating back to 2006 have consistently shown that single-use plastic bags have a smaller impact on climate change than reusable paper or cloth bags. Those facts are unlikely to change the minds of people determined to eradicate plastic bags, especially politicians who see such bans as a cost-free way to show their commitment to the environment.

Courtesy: https://wasteadvantagemag.com