#1 Kenya and its plastic bag ban.
We’re landing in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya — a country aspiring to go plastic free.
Big aftermarket.
Nairobi strikes us as a hustling-bustling city, where you can spend hours in endless traffic jams, inhaling exhaust fumes from the second-hand cars that dominate the roads. No electric vehicles here. We notice that everything on the dashboard is in Japanese and ask if the driver can understand it. He replies that he can’t read the characters, but by trial and error has figured out all of the features.
Mitumba (“second-hand”) clothes is another big thing that, according to some sources, may have offset a once booming textile industry in Kenya and there have been plans to ban the import all together. Second-hand clothes imported from the UK, Canada, Australia, China and USA are cheap and in abundance. They come in big bales, sold to individual resellers who in turn sell them to the regular folk. In Nairobi we saw mitumba sellers everywhere, from the city centre to Kibera slum.
Mass entrepreneurship.
Stuck in a traffic jam, you can buy everything from ice cream to framed pictures, or… even hire an accountant. Along the road and in the city centre we see mitumba sellers cleaning second-hand clothes. They show up after 5 pm when foot traffic is the highest — everyone is off work and rushing home, including city council officials who’d otherwise come down on the sellers.
Self-organising chaos.
Matatus, heavily decorated buses, are one of the primary means of public transport. The decorations are for attracting customers and standing out from the competition. They are changed often and reflect anything that is trendy in Kenya today: transformers, rap stars and, of course, Obama. Additional services are offered on board, such as music and drinks. “They are reckless. Some drivers don’t even have a driver’s license”, our fixer Greg says. Most traffic lights are not working and pedestrians rush across the street when they see a gap in traffic. According to our respondents, this became a norm people adapted to a long time ago.
Breaking some laws “a little bit” is commonly accepted.
Parking in the city costs 500 KES (5 USD). To save some money you can pay 100 KES (1 USD) to the “parking boys”, the entrepreneurial youth, who’ll look after your car and, in turn, pay off a city council parking controller should they show up to write you a ticket. Our fixer Greg shared his perspective on this: “I can break some laws, but only if this doesn’t hurt anyone. When I give a little money to the parking boy, I give him a job, so that he won’t go robbing me of my phone at night”.
Foreign influence is strong, visible and keeps growing.
Foreign presence is very visible here. We see a sewage truck with Chinese characters on its side, and with an Asian man next to it instructing local workers. The Indians run factories, while the Chinese and Japanese build roads and railways. “What used to take us five years, they accomplish in one”, says one of our interviewees. China is a major exporter of cheap electric appliances of low quality. According to our sources, when the bag ban was initially imposed a Chinese company was the sole supplier of non-woven carrier bags, which quickly appeared in every supermarket and small stallholder, both in the cities and rurally.
Contrasts.
Driving around Nairobi, we realize how different but close to each other its districts are. Gated communities with neat cottages for the people with high income. Slums with self-built corrugated metal dwellings for the poor. The industrial area with factories and big trucks going around. The suburb of Karen with beautiful nature and farms. Nairobi National Park with all kinds of wildlife living in a natural environment, and, of course, the hectic central area with governmental buildings, where, presumably, the starting point of our study, namely the ban on plastic bags, was initiated.
It all began with the ban. Starting Aug 28, 2017, nobody was allowed to use, sell or manufacture plastic carrier bags in Kenya.
Plastic carrier bags are illegal.
Upon landing into Kenya, KLM announced over the loudspeaker, “Please discard any plastic bags that you may have on you, in Kenya there is a plastic bag ban so for your own benefit, leave them on the plane”. Later, queueing for the customs and seeing passengers being searched and any plastic bags found being confiscated, it became apparent to us that the ban is serious.
The ban is strictly enforced.
Indeed, unlike two previous bans that failed, this one is strictly enforced. Violators are facing heavy fines and even imprisonment — maximum 4000000 KES (40000 USD) or 4 years in jail. We’ve heard of fines of KES 15000 to KES 50000 (150 and 500 USD respectively), which for a country where half households earn less than KES 10000 (100 USD) per month may seem like a harsh punishment.
The controversy of the ban has been an actively discussed topic.
On the one hand, there’s an evident reduction of the visual pollution, or the eyesore of Nairobi. City streets are cleaner and drainage ditches aren’t clogged, a blockage which used to cause flooding during heavy rains. On the other hand, a number of local plastic bag manufacturers had to shut their doors, having to find a new business and leaving several thousand workers unemployed. It also impacted regular people and small street sellers, who now have to pay extra for the new reusable non-woven bags, whose eco-friendliness and recyclability are also questionable.
The system dynamics that reinforce or obstruct the reduction of environmental pollution.
At the end of each chapter, we post a summary of our systems analysis. We list the enablers and inhibitors — the dynamics that respectively increase or lower one of the positive system outcomes — e.g. reduction of environmental pollution.
(+) Enablers
- Strictly enforced policies. Knowing that punishment is inevitable and significant makes people obey.
- Flexibility, adaptability. Although controversial, the policy is followed and generally supported by the public.
- Informal relationships. We found that informal ties and relationships have the upper hand over formal rules.
- Foreign influence. Foreign companies offer technologies and solutions ready to be used immediately.
(-) Inhibitors
- Overall poverty. People have concerns other than the environment.
- Unregulated enterprises. E.g. matatus serve drinks in plastic bottles but aren’t responsible for disposing of them properly.
- Acceptance and adaptability. E.g. broken traffic lights have become the norm.
- Foreign influence. Foreign companies pursue their own agendas and profits, not necessarily considering any negative impact on the local environment and society.
- Big aftermarket. Although providing immediate economic benefits, there’s no consideration of what happens to the second-hand products at the end of their life cycle.
