Deal with plastics before it is too late

By Patrick Bitature

The first rainy season seems to have passed. Not too soon for some of us.

It has become standard now that with the rains come the floods and with every season these become not only more and more daunting, but spread all over Kampala.

While KCCA has done a lot of work in improving drainage, we are undoing the good work with our bad habits.

Every day we dispose of tonnes of plastic improperly that find their way into the existing drainage systems of this city. These cause blockages, which we may go about blissfully unaware of until the rainy season begins.

The rainwater not only struggles to go past existing blockages but comes along with its own load of plastics to reinforce the existing blockage. The water, which should be finding its way to Lake Victoria, swells out of the drains and finds its way onto the road, into our offices and our homes.

That is the simplified version of events. This is before we even start examining how we are building in the wetlands into which a lot of this storm drain water should be flowing.

As we commemorate World Environment Day today, June 5, I would like to focus our attention on how we deal with these plastics clogging our drains and eventually irreversibly contaminating our precious Lake Victoria.

At the Private Sector Foundation of Uganda (PSFU), the issue is of great concern to us as it constitutes a direct cost on our businesses, makes doing business in Kampala that more problematic and affects efforts to improve the general living standards of our people.

What I suggest is not new but bears re-emphasising, to avert more serious disaster than seasonal flooding.

I implore us to better manage our waste.

There would be no plastic problem, if we did not use plastic anyway. So minimise your use of plastic either by moving around with bags, so your groceries can be packed for you or if you must use plastic, don't throw it away after use but use it again. Over and over again, if need be.

Also let us separate our waste. Let us dispose of our waste, organic and inorganic - particularly plastics, separately. This will make it easier to dispose of, burning or burying the organic matter and recycling the plastics.

This discipline should also be adopted at company and institutional level. 

I applaud those companies that have gone into the recycling business. I am informed that last year, we exported $4m (sh13b) worth of recycled plastic to countries as far afield as China and Hungary. And this number can only grow.

Our policy makers can consider several measures that will not only reduce the use of plastics, but also ensure the safe sustainable disposal of those that we use.

To list a few, let us legislate and enforce the separation of garbage into its separate components right from the beginning, incentivise investors in the waste disposal space, let us ban these one-use plastics or at worst encourage their reuse and let us include environmental conservation in our children's curriculum, inculcate good behaviour around waste disposal as prevention is better than cure.

As a start, the Government should just enforce what is in our statute books many of which are practical and visionary.

We at PSFU are particularly alarmed by the trends because, as a country in which seven in 10 people derive their livelihood from the soil, we cannot afford to be lax about our environment.

To come back full circle, we each have an individual responsibility to reduce or eliminate our use of plastic, if we do use look for means to reuse that plastic and if not dispose of it responsibly.

Writer is the chairman of the Private Sector Foundation of Uganda