Challenges and emerging solutions to the land-based plastic waste issue in Africa

Jambeck, Jenna; Hardesty, Britta Denise; Brooks, Amy L.; Friend, Tessa; Teleki, Kristian; Fabrés, Joan; Beaudoin, Yannick; Bamba, Abou; Francis, Julius; Ribbink, Anthony J.; Baleta, Tatjana; Bouwman, Hindrik; Knox, Jonathan; Wilcox, Chris

doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2017.10.041

Cited by 262 publications

(140 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Plastic as a percentage of MSW for sub-Saharan Africa is higher than the global average, at 13% [9] and is a waste stream of growing concern for the continent. With weak waste collection systems and disposal of waste to uncontrolled and controlled dumpsites, the leakage of plastic into the environment poses a significant threat to the environment and economies [29,30]. This is compounded by the lack of recycling in Africa.…”

Section: Environmental and Social Impacts Of Mismanaged Wastementioning

confidence: 99%

Solid Waste Management in Africa: Governance Failure or Development Opportunity?

Godfrey¹,

Ahmed²,

Gebremedhin³

et al. 2020

Regional Development in Africa

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Waste management is a social, economic, and environmental problem facing all African countries. If the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development is to be achieved, sustainable waste management approaches must be an environmental and public health imperative deserving political priority. Current reasons for the poor management of waste in Africa, include, amongst others, weak organizational structures; lack of appropriate skills; inadequate budgets; weak legislation; lack of enforcement; low public awareness; corruption, conflict; political instability; and lack of political will. At the heart of the problem, is a failure in governance. However, through these gaps, many social and technological innovations have emerged. Innovations that recognize the opportunity that waste provides as a secondary resource. Diverting waste away from dumpsites and landfills towards reuse, recycling and recovery can improve the livelihoods of thousands of informal waste reclaimers, while also creating new jobs and business opportunities for the continent. Reintroducing secondary resources such as polymer, fiber, metals and nutrients back into local value chains has the potential to strengthen manufacturing economies and reduce the economic burden on product imports. Bringing waste under control in Africa and unlocking the opportunities that "waste" provides as "resource" will require immediate intervention by government, business and civil society.

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Section: Environmental and Social Impacts Of Mismanaged Wastementioning

confidence: 99%

Solid Waste Management in Africa: Governance Failure or Development Opportunity?

Godfrey¹,

Ahmed²,

Gebremedhin³

et al. 2020

Regional Development in Africa

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“…The large amounts of plastics that can be seen floating on the surface of these lagoons demonstrate these impacts. Indeed, millions of tons of plastics are rejected in aquatic ecosystems yearly [60], with more than 4.4 million originating from Africa in 2010 [91]. Whatever the origin of plastic debris, they have a lifespan of decades, if not centuries [92].…”

Section: Where To Survey the Emergence Of Pathogens?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Urbanization and Waterborne Pathogen Emergence in Low-Income Countries: Where and How to Conduct Surveys?

Bastaraud

Cecchi

Handschumacher

et al. 2020

IJERPH

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A major forthcoming sanitary issue concerns the apparition and spreading of drug-resistant microorganisms, potentially threatening millions of humans. In low-income countries, polluted urban runoff and open sewage channels are major sources of microbes. These microbes join natural microbial communities in aquatic ecosystems already impacted by various chemicals, including antibiotics. These composite microbial communities must adapt to survive in such hostile conditions, sometimes promoting the selection of antibiotic-resistant microbial strains by gene transfer. The low probability of exchanges between planktonic microorganisms within the water column may be significantly improved if their contact was facilitated by particular meeting places. This could be specifically the case within biofilms that develop on the surface of the myriads of floating macroplastics increasingly polluting urban tropical surface waters. Moreover, as uncultivable bacterial strains could be involved, analyses of the microbial communities in their whole have to be performed. This means that new-omic technologies must be routinely implemented in low- and middle-income countries to detect the appearance of resistance genes in microbial ecosystems, especially when considering the new ‘plastic context.’ We summarize the related current knowledge in this short review paper to anticipate new strategies for monitoring and surveying microbial communities.

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“…Similar initiatives have a long history in Africa, from 'Flipiflopi' to 'Ocean Sole', both of which seek to repurpose waste plastic products into artistic representations of African heritage. Important though such interventions might be, they will need to navigate a paucity of reliable data (Jambeck et al 2018) and confront the challenges and politics of knowledge exchange across diverse cultural traditions, industries and national policy frameworks in order to provide effective responses to escalating levels of plastic pollution.…”

Section: Securing Africa's Blue Economy In Space and Timementioning

confidence: 99%

Securing the blue: political ecologies of the blue economy in Africa

Childs

Hicks

2019

Journal of Political Ecology

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The Blue Economy concept is being embraced enthusiastically in Africa, both internally and externally. However, this new framing creates and calls for new understandings of how actors and places relate to one another, control, and create meaning and value. Thus, understanding the ocean - and its conceptual and material fabric - in this context, is a matter of political ecology, raising a number of questions that extend across geographies, spatio-temporalities, and political actors, both human and more-than-human. In this article, we flesh out these questions. An understanding of historical efforts to legally secure oceanic space can help contextualize the emergent African blue economy, one which we propose rests predominantly on the notion of 'security.' We demonstrate how resources are economically, environmentally, and politically 'secured' as they are first constructed as economic objects of accumulation, then militarized as matters of geopolitical security, and finally controlled through technologies of monitoring, surveillance, and resistance. The 'security' of the blue growth agenda and its effects operates across different temporal and spatial dimensions and are realized in different ways across the continent as explored in the six articles in this Special Section.Keywords: blue economy, deep sea mining, political ecology, oceanic space, security

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Challenges and emerging solutions to the land-based plastic waste issue in Africa

Cited by 262 publications

References 17 publications

Solid Waste Management in Africa: Governance Failure or Development Opportunity?

Solid Waste Management in Africa: Governance Failure or Development Opportunity?

Urbanization and Waterborne Pathogen Emergence in Low-Income Countries: Where and How to Conduct Surveys?

Securing the blue: political ecologies of the blue economy in Africa

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