REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi
Plastics are here to stay. They are easy and inexpensive to make and have been a significant driver for development. But plastic waste has become an omnipresent threat – with public health, livelihoods and the environment all suffering.
Plastic can take hundreds of thousands of years to decompose and is already becoming a part of our fossil record.
Africa
The fishermen of Bargny, on a sheltered bay on the coast of Senegal, understand these consequences all too well. Serigne Abass Pouye faces the problem every time he goes out for the day.
“What do we see most at sea? Plastics everywhere,” says Pouye.
Their fishing grounds are now infested with plastic waste, reducing their catch. Turtle breeding sites on the beach are so cluttered with trash that hatchlings die because they cannot reach the water.
Damage to the ecosystem is compromising biodiversity – negatively impacting the lives and livelihoods of the residents here. At times, bundles of plastic jam and damage the boats, making it difficult to work at all.
“As soon as we leave the shore, plastic gets tangled in our boats, which can capsize and break. All the plastic from the land goes into the sea. Discarded fishing nets also bundle up, block our boats and invade marine habitats,” says Bargny resident Abdou Rahman Wade.
Southeast of Bargny, resting on the Saloum river, people in the port city of Kaolack face similar challenges on land.
When it rains, drains clog with plastics, flowing into streets and homes.
Rivers of plastic flow where children play and the stagnant water becomes host to water-borne diseases.
Women who raise cows or goats as income for their households also suffer, as their livestock consumes the plastics that contaminate the landscape and are sickened or die – taking a huge toll on a family’s wealth.
Ndiouck Mbaye, President of the Rural Women’s Association in Kaolak, expresses the frustration felt by so many:
“We are tired of seeing plastic in our lives. It is everywhere and it has many negative impacts. When you go in the forest, plastic is mixed in the soil, killing our flora. Nothing can grow. It often kills our cattle, our only treasure. Our drains are infested with plastic, making kids and adults sick. “
Despite these persistent challenges, Senegal has also had some successes in addressing the unrelenting problem of plastic waste. Take Mbeubeuss, the main dumpsite for the lively capital region of Dakar.
Opened in 1968, it is now one of the largest open dumps in west Africa, serving nearly 4 million people by taking in 475,000 tons of waste a year. Situated near both a major city and the sea, it has become a major source of air, land, and water pollution.
Waste is both a serious problem and an opportunity for the region. Take the $220 million West Africa Coastal Areas Program (WACA) for example, which supports countries in curbing marine plastic pollution, creating finance opportunities, developing innovative solutions, and spurring citizen engagement to make coastal communities more resilient.
Unlike other litter, there are ways for plastic to be repurposed and have continued value, but this requires proper sorting and processing. At Mbeubeuss, more than 2,500 people do just that, thanks to a $125 million credit from the International Development Association to support the Municipal Waste Management Program.
The project is designed to help these waste-pickers with social, entrepreneurial, and skills development. The project also funded a recycling facility on the site to improve management of the recycling process. With better treatment of the waste, more material can be exported to manufacturers making rugs, clothes, furniture, and other products.
More waste is reused, less contaminates the landscape and ocean, and livelihoods are boosted.
The “Big Picture” Challenge
Unfortunately, the problems faced by Senegal are not unique. Over the last 60 years, 8.3 billion tons of plastic have been produced around the world, but only 9.5% of it has been recycled.
The remaining 7.5 billion tons has been left to pile up on land and clog waterways. Furthermore, most plastic is for single use items – meaning its usefulness is very short while its lifespan is very, very long. And there are only so many things that can be done with plastic once it is created.
Today, production of plastic far outpaces our ability to manage it when it becomes waste, and the current amounts are expected to triple by 2050.
The detrimental effects of plastic pollution touch every living thing across every ecosystem on the planet. It is inescapable and has negative impacts on health and livelihoods – not to mention the cleanliness of communities around the globe.
Ndiouck Mbaye from Kaolack, Senegal, leads over 300,000 rural women and is a strong voice on how plastic affect their lives.
The World Bank is committed to tackling plastic pollution, recognizing it as a key element in alleviating extreme poverty. Today the World Bank Group supports efforts in more than 50 countries around the globe and at every stage of the plastic lifecycle.
Using an approach focused on better understanding the drivers of this challenge, working with partners to develop policy solutions, and driving innovation, the end goal of this global engagement is a more circular economy that spans all sectors.
Knowledge Building
The first step in ending plastic pollution is to fully understand both its sources and its impact. Economies large and small continue to rely on plastic pollutants to drive economic growth without considering the cost of the accompanying environmental damage.
Knowledge building is critical in pinpointing the true causes of plastic pollution and breaking down the social and political barriers to ending it.
The World Bank’s expertise and deep connections are combining to uncover the sources of plastic pollution so policymakers, community leaders, and the private sector can align and take effective action.
The Middle East and North Africa
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has the highest per capita amount of plastic waste entering into the sea. On average, annual costs of marine-plastic pollution amount to 0.8% of regional GDP and exceed 2% in Djibouti, Tunisia, and the Republic of Yemen. Furthermore, the Mediterranean – idealized for its natural beauty – is among the world’s most plastic-polluted seas.
The World Bank is focused on helping define the human and economic impact of asset degradation, craft incentives to address challenges, strengthen institutions, and make strategic investments.
As part of these efforts, the recent report, Blue Skies, Blue Seas: Air Pollution, Marine Plastics, and Coastal Erosion in the Middle East and North Africa, elevates the importance of “blue” natural assets – air and oceans – to quantify the true cost of the region’s reliance on greenhouse gas-producing industries.
Its policy, finance, and civic engagement strategies span sectors and aim to strengthen regional capacity for managing existing waste, while working in parallel to jump-start a circular economy through proposals to finance research into plastic alternatives and recycling to keep resources in continuous use. These multi-sectoral solutions are mapped across a time horizon – offering a striking vision for a blue future in the region.
South Asia
South Asia generates around 334 million tons of mismanaged waste annually. From that, up to 15 million tons of plastic make their way into the Indian Ocean each year.
The Indus River exemplifies this problem. This mighty waterway has fed the croplands of South Asia for centuries. It has the greatest system of canal irrigation in the world, provides hydropower, and hosts rich marine life – making its health critical to the livelihoods of millions.
It is also one of the most plastic-polluted rivers in the world and one of the biggest contributors to marine plastic pollution, channeling plastics into irrigation systems – which have the potential to breakdown and enter the food chain- and leaking an estimated 11,977 tons of plastic into the Arabian Sea (and beyond) every year.
In a first of its kind study in Pakistan, the World Bank recently published Plastic Waste: A Journey Down the Indus River Basin in Pakistan. This work is the first to provide the foundation necessary to raise plastics-in-rivers as a major policy and developmental issue.
The study tackles the questions critical to building a successful regional system for managing solid waste. The report also highlights facilities, laws, and regulations necessary to reverse the problem – creating a cornerstone of information to allow researchers, policy makers, and others to take effective action.
Policy Solutions
Better knowledge leads to better policies by allowing stakeholders to craft powerful incentives for both producers and users to take positive action throughout the entire plastic lifecycle.
Latin America and the Caribbean
A prime example of knowledge informing policy action can be found in Grenada. The small Caribbean island is highly reliant on its marine and coastal ecosystems to support livelihoods and protect it from the impacts of climate change. But plastic pollution continues to contaminate its watersheds, coastline, and ocean – damaging the island’s biodiversity and tourism.
With $20 million from the World Bank, the Second Fiscal Resilience and Blue Growth Development Policy Credit has enabled the island to embark on a transition to a resilient, blue economy by allowing policymakers to implement several reforms designed to strengthen marine and coastal management and build climate resilience.
The dividends of these efforts are already on display, with the nation ending imports of Styrofoam food containers, single-use plastic bags, and disposable plastic plates, forks, and spoons in 2019. The country also increased coastal zone protection from 3% in 2016 to 20% in 2020.
Since beginning this transition, the island has seen decreased contamination in coastal environments, improved welfare of coastal communities, and indirect positive impacts and health benefits for fishing and marine tourism.
Europe and Central Asia
Croatia’s stunning coastline and natural beauty do not just serve as a backdrop for the country’s rich heritage, they are a foundation for economic growth. The country’s islands and coastline, pristine forests, croplands, and abundant water sources are important contributors to total wealth, with the tourism sector accounting for 21% of Croatia’s GDP in 2019 – higher than any other EU member state.
Here, the opportunity exists to develop a blue economy champion that will be a model for the European Union (EU) and world as a whole – spurred by deeper understanding and improved policy making.
In the report, Croatia: Cost of Environmental Degradation, the World Bank identifies the environmental issues with the most potential to harm the country’s natural capital and estimates the cost of not taking action.
For instance, the report found that because of the heavily seasonal nature of Croatia’s tourism (half of all visits occur during just two months of the year) additional efforts to clean up waste simply cannot solve the problem.
Instead, the report demonstrates how improved collection and treatment of waste, paired with increased capacity for recycling and reuse, can provide the foundation for more sustainable and resilient growth.
With this concrete understanding of the costs of inaction, policymakers are now better able to calculate the tradeoffs of different policy recommendations and find the most effective path forward to a circular economy.
Spurring Innovation
The third development piece in the plastics puzzle needed to promote meaningful change is innovation. By focusing on new approaches and solutions – based on improved knowledge and supported by a more responsive policy environment – countries around the world can lay the foundation for a growth model that is green, resilient, and inclusive.
East Asia and the Pacific
Countries in the East Asia and Pacific (EAP) region discarded an estimated 686 million metric tons of municipal solid waste in 2020 – nearly 31% of the world’s waste. Solving challenges on this scale requires creativity and deep local knowledge.
This approach is helping improve conditions in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, where waste clogs canals and causes trash to pile up in front of people’s homes and along roadways.
Using drones, trash monitors can identify different types of waste in an effort to better understand and address the source of the problem. This allows policymakers to educate citizens about where their waste is going and design incentives to reduce the amount of plastic used in packaging.
The World Bank is also working with the ASEAN Secretariat and its partners to strengthen polices and regulatory frameworks governing the production and use of plastics in Southeast Asia.
The new Southeast Asia Regional Program on Combating Marine Plastics (SEA-MaP) aims to reduce plastic consumption, increase recycling, and minimize leakages to prevent land and sea-based marine plastic pollution.
It will also support coastal and blue economies – which are particularly affected by marine litter and its effects on several key sectors, including fisheries, tourism, and shipping.
Working with ASEAN member states, the World Bank has undertaken country-specific diagnostic market studies on plastics and is supporting the development of national action plans and roadmaps relating to phasing-out single-use plastics and strengthening plastics circularity.
Latin America and the Caribbean
Across the globe – in Jamaica’s capital, Kingston – a different type of innovation is helping overcome the challenges posed by plastic waste. With its stunning white beaches, emerald waters, and views of the Blue Mountains National Park, it is no wonder this city is known around the world as a prime tourism destination.
However, Kingston is also becoming well known for its trash. The city’s population of 580,000 generates about 420,000 tons of waste per year- half of all the waste produced in Jamaica.
Compounding the issue is a lack of trucks to regularly collect waste, no sanitary landfills, and almost no separation of recyclables or organic waste from other waste.
Plastic bottle recycling in Kingston, Jamaica.
With help from a World Bank Results Based Financing scheme, Kingston’s solid waste management authority was given new waste collection trucks in return for providing sufficient and regular waste collection services to support the local government’s efforts to improve sanitation.
The scheme also helps fund environmental wardens – community members who proactively promote environmental awareness to change habits at the individual level.
As the city does a better job collecting waste, with citizens adopting resources for better waste management at home, the entire city benefits.
Bringing It All Together
When knowledge, policy, and innovation combine, the result is truly remarkable. Every new policy, resource, and decision-making tool created in coordination with our partner countries is to meant improve the lives of people by transforming the lifecycle of plastic from linear (creation to waste) to circular (reduce, reuse, recycle).
The resulting circular economy helps improve lives and boost livelihoods by closing the loop between extraction, manufacturing, and disposal by designing products to reduce waste, using products and materials for as long as possible, and recycling materials from end‐of‐life products back into the economy.
South Asia
Recognizing the need for this transformation, the Indian Ocean archipelago of Maldives has made it a priority to combat its plastic pollution problem.
Beautiful beaches and a unique marine environment have made tourism the country’s top industry and has helped lift the country into middle income status, with a 100% literacy rate and a life expectancy of 77 years. But this development has come with costs. Waste from the country’s resort islands and international airport is six times greater than that produced by locals.
The government has adopted a “waste to wealth approach” in its national Strategic Action Plan (SAP) and two World Bank-financed projects – the Maldives Clean Environment Project (MCEP) and the Maldives Enhancing Employability and Resilience of Youth (MEERY) Project – are helping the government develop a sustainable waste management system, build capacity, and teach youth to lay the groundwork for a cleaner and safer Maldives.
Employing a multipronged approach, these projects are working with the government to develop waste management facilities, strengthen national policy around waste management, segregate waste at its source, and develop new business models to better integrate waste management.
Both projects will also help develop green job and entrepreneurship opportunities designed to boost the country’s economy.
In addition, there are several local organizations that are supporting plastic waste reduction and the circular economy, including Parley Maldives – which works directly with local groups and island communities to boost conservation efforts and intercept and recycle plastic waste while also educating the next generation.
Every Effort Counts
Plastic pollution is a complex, universal problem that must be solved before there is further ecological harm. We must ask new questions that will add to our knowledge base, take creative approaches to policymaking, and support ground-breaking innovation. These efforts can start small and grow beyond anyone’s imagination.
In 1998, Ceesay, who lives in The Gambia – where 84% of the country’s plastic waste is mismanaged and leads to clogged drainage areas, flooding, disease, and contaminated food sources – decided to turn this plastic waste into an asset by processing plastic waste into strips that could be woven into items like bags, purses, and wallets.
Eventually, Ceesay expanded her small, environmental enterprise beyond her own village of N’jau.
“As a Gambian, as an African, I wanted to contribute towards it [solving the plastics crisis]. I am not a rich person, I am not a big education star, I just had some information and I couldn’t keep that information to myself. I wanted to share it with other people,” says Ceesay.
Today, Women’s Initiative Gambia trains and empowers thousands of women, youth, and disabled groups to earn money while reducing plastic waste in their community. Dubbed Gambia’s “Queen of Recycling” Ceesay has traveled the world, telling her story and inspiring others to take bold action to tackle plastic pollution.
Plastic is here to stay, but plastic waste does not have to be. The World Bank is putting its decades of experience to work, transforming plastic pollution challenges into opportunities to achieve green, resilient and inclusive development.
