Nigel Harris, Tearfund’s Chief Executive, encountered a river of plastic in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He also saw a team of men and women turning the waste into something beautiful.
The locals used to call Kinshasa Kin la belle (Kinshasa the beautiful). They were proud of their capital, home to 12 million people. Now they call it Kin la poubelle (Kinshasa the dustbin). Sadly, it was all too easy to see why...
I stood in the middle of the DRC’s capital city next to a river of plastic bottles. The photo really doesn’t give you a full sense of the scale of the build up of plastic waste – the river of bottles stretched far off into the distance.
We were making a short film about the plastic problem. As we stood there filming, a passer-by lobbed a bottle behind me – narrowly missing my head. It was quite unbelievable. But there is little in the way of waste collection in Kinshasa, and local people aren’t aware of the damage it is doing.
Death by plastic
Plastic bottles, at least, usually stay on the surface of the water. But water is also sold in plastic bags – it’s known as water bagging – which are also not properly disposed of. Discarded water and other plastic bags find their way into the pipes, clogging up an already inadequate sewerage system. This often causes floods which leads to sickness and loss of life.