Fears plastic waste is set to pile up in Africa
ENVIRONMENTALISTS are afraid that Kenya, and Africa generally, will become a dumping ground for plastic waste while billion-dollar multinational corporations profit by pushing their responsibilities offshore and significantly add to the mounting plastic waste crisis.
This follows the American Chemistry Council (ACC) advocating and lobbying the US government to use free trade agreement talks with Kenya to increase the plastic industry’s presence in Africa.
The ACC penned a letter to US trade representatives at the end of April with a list of recommendations when negotiating with Kenya.
The ACC anticipates that the East African country could serve as the future hub for supplying US chemicals and plastics to other African markets through the US-Kenya trade agreement.
It is advocating for immediate tariff elimination between the two countries.
This would allow the continued expansion of bilateral trade in chemicals and plastics.
Through Kenya’s increased logistic capacity in all spheres – ground, air and sea – it will also allow for the expansion of the chemical trade throughout the continent, the ACC wrote.
The ACC represents companies such as Shell, Exxon, Total, DuPont and Dow.
Some of these companies have committed to spending $1 billion (R16.6bn) in waste management in order to prevent pollution in Africa and Asia.
Some of them are also members of the Alliance to End Plastic Waste.
However, Greenpeace’s investigative journalism hub, Unearthed, claims they hold documents that show the ACC and the US recycling industry are lobbying against changes to the international Basel Convention that limit plastic waste entering low-middle income countries.
The US is not among the 187 signatories to the Basel Convention, an international regulatory body for the environmentally responsible management and disposal of hazardous waste.
The convention’s new amendments to plastic waste were signed last year and effective from January next year.
The amendments prohibit trading mixed, unrecyclable and contaminated plastic waste with the US.
Kenya has been a signatory to the convention since 2000.
On July 8, formal talks began between US trade representative Robert Lighthizer and Kenya cabinet secretary for industry and trade Betty Maina for a free trade agreement between the two countries, the State Department for Industrialisation, Kenya, stated on Twitter.
Greenpeace Africa senior political adviser Fredrick Njehu said: “The Kenyan government should not backslide on the progress made in its plastic-free ambitions by folding to pressure from fossil fuel giants, because it stands to derail the progress made across the entire continent.”
Kate Melges, Greenpeace USA senior plastics campaigner, as well as US Democratic Senator Tom Udall, both find it “shameful” and “outrageous” that fossil fuel giants are advocating to expand plastic pollution in Africa in the name of profits.
Njehu said: “This trade deal could turn Kenya into a dumpsite and diminish what the country has achieved.”
He referred to strides the East African country has made after its aggressive 2017 law on plastic bag production, sale and use.
An online petition has been set up by the environmental NGO to prevent the Kenyan government from destroying this progress, titled “Do Not Backslide on Plastic”.