Memes/Tweets (No politics)
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@booboo Purely by chance I have been hearing a lot about plastic waste over the last week or so.
Points I remember
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Plastic waste is growing faster in Africa than anywhere else in the world
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The equivalent of a football pitch of plastic is dumped in sub-saharan Africa every minute
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Mainly because most African cities have poor waste collection services, which are user pays. So people either burn the stuff out the back of their home or take it to the nearest drain / stream and dump it.
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Dakar alone uses 5 million single use plastic bags a day.
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Coastal west african countries produce 7 million tonnes of plastic per annum. Most within 25 kms of the coast. Most of it ends up in the sea. There are literally thousands of tonnes of plastic (mainly bags and bottles) along the entire coastline and enormous islands of the stuff in the Gulf of Guinea
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Fisherman can't get out to sea through the plastic and when they do there are no fish anyway
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Similarly agricultural land is being lost as once you burn plastic on soil you contaminate it so crops won't grow.
All very depressing. The one interesting positive? was that for all the expensive recycling schemes in the west 60% of the plastic that is recycled globally comes from poor third world rubbish pickers
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