West Africa is drowning in plastic. Who is responsible?
Agnes Kwansah dragged her sacks across the dusty truck yard, around assorted piles of garbage, to reach the pop-up weighing station.
She’d spent the last month collecting discarded bottles around Swedru, a town about 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of Accra, the Ghanaian capital. They weren’t hard to find: Plastic pollution is a scourge across Africa and Ghana was once ranked as the world’s seventh messiest nation.
Yet now the country is being hailed as a success story, thanks to a corporate-sponsored cleanup. The event in Swedru was organized by the Ghana Recycling Initiative by Private Enterprises (GRIPE), a coalition of international companies that has won plaudits for its recycling efforts in a nation without much formal waste collection.
GRIPE’s members — including subsidiaries of Coca-Cola, Unilever, Nestle, Danone and Dow Chemical — have the financial clout to make a difference, with combined global sales of their parent companies at more than $340 billion. The companies also happen to be the source of many of the bottles and wrappers that end up in West Africa’s rivers and lagoons, choking wildlife, or burning in illegal dumps, fouling the air.
Despite the dire environmental consequences, the world has never produced more plastic — some 500 million tons annually — and experts predict that to double by 2040. One reason is that plastic is cheap and useful. Another is the success of industry-led campaigns to convince us we can use it sustainably.
Kwansah, 47, watched expectantly as two men hauled her 220 kilograms (485 pounds) of empty soda bottles onto digital scales, then pocketed the handful of banknotes they gave her in return. She said she hoped “those in charge” would do the right thing and reuse the plastic containers she delivered. But those in charge of GRIPE haven’t done much to solve Ghana’s plastic problem, a Bloomberg Green investigation found. Instead, the organization’s members seem intent on shifting responsibility onto someone else: their customers.
Near the Swedru weighing station, a poster showed GRIPE’s cartoon mascot, Auntie Litta, raising a gloved finger in admonishment. Auntie Litta is a typical citizen who cares about the environment, according to GRIPE’s website. She seems to spend much of her time berating Ghanaians for their supposed bad habits. “Don’t be a Borla Bird!” she exhorts, a reference to a local species that’s known for living in garbage.
As Kwansah walked away with her fistful of cash, GRIPE manager Louisa Kabobah gave a speech reinforcing the point. “Plastics itself is not the problem,” she said. The people using it are.
Love it or hate it, plastic is a matter of life and death in Ghana, a nation of 32 million where a quarter of the population lives in poverty and many citizens can’t cook with what comes from their taps without risking sickness. Plastic bottles and sachets are a vital source of clean drinking water, but with little formal waste collection, they are also a dangerous source of pollution. There are discarded containers on every curb in Accra. On the city’s beaches, smoldering piles stain the sand. Slum dwellers use plastic to cover their shacks while children use windblown scraps of it to make kites.
Accra’s drains are so choked with trash, especially plastic bottles, that it floods every rainy season. In 2015, the flooding was so bad that more than 200 people died in the capital, most of them killed when a fire broke out at a gas station where they were sheltering. (A government report identified poor drainage and floating waste as factors contributing to the severity of the disaster). Afterwards, there were calls to ban certain types of plastic.
The region’s biggest consumer companies held meetings through the Association of Ghana Industries, a leading trade organization, to come up with their own solutions. What emerged was GRIPE, which was unveiled in 2017 with a mission to “implement recycling and second-life solutions that reduce the impacts of post-consumer plastic waste on the environment.”
Among GRIPE’s earliest activities were exploring whether used plastic could be turned into construction material — school toilets in one instance — and holding pop-up buyback events where Ghanaians could sell their waste to specialist recyclers. The original contract between GRIPE’s members, dated November 2017, recognized the “immense” contribution that the private sector could make to waste collection in Ghana. It also extolled the unmatched benefits of plastic packaging: “light, easily shaped, strong … affordable.”