Africa has some wonderfully strange smells, sights, cultures, and customs. It also has some very familiar sights such as plastic bag litter. We visited a bustling market in Mindelo, Cape Verde Islands. Here, people shop for food daily and plan meals around what is fresh and readily available. We didn’t see one person there with reusable bags. They all got the cheap plastic bags from the vendors, and they are doing this daily. Where do you think all these bags end up? There and everywhere else we visited in West Africa, they ended up on the ground, in pits, and in waterways, wending their way out to sea. There they end up in the craws of sea turtles, birds, and fish, eventually strangling them.
Other plastic debris is just as ubiquitous. Bottle caps, rings off bottles, even disposable lighters have ended up in the stomachs of birds that died. Our love affair with plastics and disposables in general is killing wildlife and trashing our world. Plastics have become the babies of the third world where money is scarce and the per capita annual income is around $200. Plastic is cheap to produce and so more readily available for the indigent.
This is an issue that deserves some attention. Plastic bags can be easily replaced by cloth bags for shopping in these cultures where they make their own cloth, if they had a reason to do so. But plastic bags are handy and free. We’re making great headway with plastic bag litter, and some with other disposables in the United States, but hardly any in these forgotten parts of the world we come so far to visit. How do we choose between malaria eradication and plastic bag litter? It’s not even a contest.
