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How women are leading the way in tackling plastic pollution
11 February 2022
To mark International Day of Women and Girls in Science, some of the Afri-Plastics Challenge team have highlighted the crucial and often undervalued role that women and girls are playing in solving the global plastic crisis.
The vitality of water in the sustenance of human life is undeniable. With its presence in our food, our air, and our bodies, it occupies a fundamental element in the satisfaction of all basic human needs. Despite the fact that water covers 71% of the earth’s surface, 40% of the global population suffer from water scarcity resulting from rapidly ballooning populations and the increasing impact of climate change. With the dearth of water having widespread effects on sustainable development and the integrity of our natural environment, and set to drastically affect half of the world’s population by 2030, we need to rethink the value of water.
Currently, over 96% of all the earth’s water exists in oceans, producing over half of the oxygen that we breathe and capturing 40% of all carbon dioxide produced. Yet, in recent years, we have continued to choke the very ecosystem that enables us to breathe, to the extent that every square mile of oceans contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic. Due to the breakdown of plastic into microplastics, floating plastic from the land is the biggest threat to the world’s marine environments and the attainment of Sustainable Development Goal 6 – clean water and sanitation.
An estimated 300 million tonnes of plastic waste is generated around the world every year and eight million tonnes of it ends up in our oceans. Whilst plastic pollution is widespread, reaching every region and country, there are differences in impact due to variations in policy responses, infrastructure, and consumer needs and demands. In Sub-Saharan Africa the demand for plastic has substantially increased in recent years, and this growth is expected to make the region dominant globally in terms of total waste generation in the coming decades.
Women are working at the very heart of plastic waste management and the informal economy is driving this – the value that women bring to addressing plastic pollution is undeniable.
The role of women in the value chain
Women in particular play a critical role across the plastic and water value chains – as gatekeepers of household consumption who purchase products packaged in plastic, and collectively spend 200 million work hours in just one day collecting water for their families. Further down the system, women engage in an informal capacity as collectors of plastic waste. In fact, the bulk of informal workers within the plastic value chain are women – in Ghana alone, 99% of those washing and sorting plastic waste are women. Women waste-pickers and sorters endure difficult conditions including limited and inconsistent pay (especially in comparison to men), health and safety risks, and stigmatisation and harassment. Women are working at the very heart of plastic waste management and the informal economy is driving this – the value that women bring to addressing plastic pollution is undeniable.
Whilst formalised roles for women are in the minority, there are opportunities for women to operate outside of traditional lower paid/skilled roles offered by the informal economy. More and more women innovators are leading the way, demonstrating how they can address the plastic waste problem in sustainable ways that are embedded in communities. In South Africa, Lynn Worsley established All Women Recycling that makes new products out of discarded plastic bottles, creating a market for plastic waste whilst also providing training and job opportunities at various levels. The company is scaling globally, but still focusing impact locally within its community. Meanwhile in Ghana, Magvision Recycling co-founded by Magdalene Ontoba, is collecting and processing plastic waste, whilst also providing education and awareness raising to local communities on sustainable waste management. These are just two examples of the many trailblazing women innovators who are working in the plastic waste management sector on the continent. The opportunity for innovation and entrepreneurship to address the problem of our polluted waters is huge. Local solutions from local innovators have the potential to create global sustainable change, but support through partnership for the goals is required to achieve such audacious goals.
Diversifying the formal plastic waste management sector and disrupting it through innovation is key in sustainably safeguarding our marine environments.
Partnership for the goals
The Afri-Plastics Challenge is supporting African innovators to develop their own local solutions to plastic waste mismanagement in a way that empowers women and girls, enabling them to be agents of change. This is about how women can lead across all areas of the value chain – downstream and upstream; as waste pickers and collectors, but also as entrepreneurs, innovators, consumers and community leaders – influencing the market to support the shift towards a circular economy.
We need more opportunities like the Afri-Plastics Challenge for local solutions to be nurtured, developed and ultimately scaled. And this scale can take different forms – expanding the scope of a handful of big solutions, as well as supporting a swell of innovators to create a wave of micro impacts. Regardless, local context and lived experience is invaluable in creating the sustainable change we need to address the problem of plastic waste – and furthermore, the role that women and girls play in this cannot be overstated. The inclusion of women and girls beyond the roles of waste pickers and sorters at the bottom of the value chain is vital. Diversifying the formal plastic waste management sector and disrupting it through innovation is key in sustainably safeguarding our marine environments.
However, the solution to the global water and plastic crisis is not linear – we can only solve it if we work together. Much like the essence of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, equality, diversity and inclusion in building capacity for water sustainability rests on all of us. Therefore, in a sector that is highly underrepresented and undersupported, meaningful change in rethinking the value of water and the impact of plastic,as well as establishing gender equality in science is not only reliant on the efforts of women and girls, but also on the collaboration of men and boys.
