FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Preliminary Data Released from Fair Trade Recycling "Plastic Litter Offset" Collection In Cameroon, Africa

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 28, 2023

Contact: Robin Ingenthron, Founder World Reuse Repair and Recycling Association [WR3A] robin @ fairtraderecycling.net 8O2 -377- 9166

Groundbreaking Report Unveils Critical Insights into Costs of Plastic Litter Collection Offsets in Africa: Key Findings Revealed

[MIDDLEBURY, VT] - Fair Trade Recycling, an export reform conservation group dedicated to partnerships in Emerging Markets to safeguard the planet's natural resources, is delighted to announce the release of a comprehensive report on a Two Year Pilot Project to test least expensive plastic litter collection in Cameroon, Africa. The report, titled "Reducing Plastic Litter in African Cities: Cost-Effective Methods and Potential for Recycling Offsets," presents groundbreaking discoveries based on a partnership between University of Yaounde’s new NGO Enprosa Action, WR3A (dba Fair Trade Recycling) and Good Point Recycling of Middlebury VT and Brockton, MA.

"We hope to make this effort ongoing, a win-win-win, for the environment, African jobs, and the plastic industry.,” said the lead researcher, Dr. Asi Quiggle Atud of Universite de Yaounde, Cameroon.

Authored by intern and translator Meline Marguet of Universite de Tours - IAE and edited by WR3A founder and president Robin Ingenthron, the report documents the incredible success of Dr. Asi Quiggle, Cameroun, in his investigation of the most cost effective method of plastic litter collection in Africa's ocean-facing cities.

According to Dr. Asi’s associate, Edith Mouafo, “to improve the environment it would be important to act on 3 axes: Improve waste collection methods in Africa, Raise awareness among populations on the importance of sorting waste at household level… and finally promote the development of industries for recycling these materials, their reuse and their energy recovery in other sectors of activity.”aa

According to Ingenthron, "I met Dr. Asi Quigle Atud 35 plus years after I had said goodbye to him - he was 5 years old - at my Peace Corps post in remote Ngaoundal, Cameroon - his father was my landlord and we shared a compound. When we reunited on Facebook, he was a month from being awarded his Ph.D in Urban Wastewater Management. " Ingenthron says that "on a lark" he raised $1500 (donation from Good Point Recycling and individuals via a GoFundMe campaign), and wired it to Dr. Asi Quiggle in Cameroon to come up with the cheapest way possible of diverting plastic litter BEFORE it washes to the sea and back on to the beaches.






Here are the members of the team who participated in the collection of plastic waste in Yaounde, Douala and Limbe during the period May-June-July 2023.

Dr. Asi and his team of students from U of Yaounde first published a 41 page report titled titled "Prospects for Recycling Offsets in Douala and Limbe" which documented how plastic litter discarded on city streets in urban centers is washed by annual stormwater runoff every rainy season, and predicted the time that plastic bottles would arrive in "bottlenecks" and choke points in city canals and gutters where Dr. Asi predicted the plastic would "collect itself" before more rain eventually washed it to sea.

According to Ingenthron "We were already astounded that a mere $1500 donation with no strings attached led to such an incredibly detailed report. Imagine our shock when Dr. Asi's team actually took the next steps the following year and demonstrated the cost effectiveness - by actually collecting the plastic bottles and delivering them to a recycler in three separate cities!"

Dr. Asi and the team established Environmental Protection and Sanitation Action (Enprosa Action) in an effort to actually capitalize on the opportunity to demonstrate the pilot project. The report being released this weekend shows the number of hours his team needed to collect several tons of plastic litter in three Cameroon cities - the capital Yaounde, the port city of Douala, and the anglophone beach city of Limbe.

In the first example, Yaounde, Dr. Asi and the Enprosa Action team spent 15 days focused on 8 different “litter concentrations” in urban water canals around the capital. The collections averaged 7 members per team, 4.3 hours per site, and collected in all 4.24 tons of plastic in a total of 7,748 labor hours. At Cameroon’s minimum wage, that would have cost $2,866 dollars.




Middlebury, VT based WR3A (an NGO funded primarily by Good Point Recycling) describes the potential for these plastic collections to be auctioned as “offsets”. Like carbon trading programs introduced in Europe two decades ago, the credits for the litter collection can potentially be auctioned to plastic industry giants, scrap plastic exporters, beverage industry giants, or even small recyclers like Good Point. Even cities whose recycling rates have stalled might choose to fund collections overseas rather than spend millions on diminishing returns to collect more plastic in their curbside programs.


Wilfred Mbah, a native of Limbe, Cameroun, former MA DEP Recycling staffer, is providing a peer review for the study. Mbah has just retired from DEP to accept a full scholarship at Harvard Kennedy School of Government and is providing advice and peer review for the study.“Dr. Asi may have invented a way to do that - and less expensively than sending westerners with nets to fish it out of the ocean.”




The group is sober about the potential for misuse, exaggeration, double counting, and “greenwashing” which has at times plagued voluntary carbon “offset” programs. In the coming months, Meline Marguet’s fellow intern from the University of Vermont, Nick Carney, will experiment with NFT’s and blockchain tracking methods to possibly address fraud or multiple claims of the same plastic diversion. But the potential for a dollar spent on “low hanging fruit” in a high employment ocean facing city to make a bigger difference than an additional dollar spent to collect litter in a western “silo of guilt” (like Vermont) is intriguing to the volunteers and sponsors of this project.




Dr. Asi concluded, “To reduce the rate of plastic waste, in our environment and especially in the sea, will require investment to industrialise plastic recycling in Africa. It is also important to sensitize the population on basic management of plastic waste and to involve all actors of economic circle to join their effort.””




Ingenthron and Dr. Asi are also conscious of the job opportunities litter offset might create. Cameroon’s official monthly minimum wage translates to $.037 per hour. Rather than “exploit” that inexpensive labor (a trope common among anti-export groups), Cameroon can employ an army of willing workers to collect and recycle its own litter. If the plastic can be re-sold for $0.35 per kg in baled form, the cost of “offsetting” could be even lower.







For a full copy of the report, visit fairtraderecycling.org.gg

Proposal for "Respected African Elders" PSA Campaign to Reduce Ocean Litter in African Coastal Cities

Proposal for "Respected African Elders" PSA Campaign to Reduce Ocean Litter in African Coastal Cities

See text below the photos. Photos were provided by Dr. Asi Quiggle Atud, professor of Urban Wastewater Management, at the University of Yaounde. His plan and project were funded by a measely $1500 grant from World Reuse Repair and Recycling Association Go Fund Me campaign - which honestly had not expected it to fund even the initial 40+ page plan report.

This will be a two or three part blog... this weekend, Dr Asi's ENPROSA Action Team did a third exercise at the beach in Buea, Cameroon, to compare the labor hours to collect plastic already washed to sea and washed back onto beaches - to the Kg per hour they collected in cities in the EARLY rainy season, when stormwater monsoon rains consolidated it in canals but not yet to the ocean.

While we began doing this to promote it as an alternative to other plastic litter offset measures, we are also reflecting on greenwashing, and possible perverse consequences to making litter a "commodity". We also have yet to fully investigate the plastic brick manufacturing plants which buy or accept the litter this, and other teams like WasteAid doing similar work.

In a social media post on Facebook, another Returned Cameroon Peace Corp Volunteer, remarked that education of African children - future citizens - is also vital.

Gail Spence

True. Teaching young people as part of school curriculum not to litter or pollute also creates new and future generations new behavior and how pollution and littering hurts them and their communities. America did it in the 70’s in many cities and it made a big differences along with putting out more public garbage cans.

So the rest of this post, below the photos and "see more", outlines a proposal for a PSA loosely based upon the flawed but effective "Crying Indian" PSA by Keep America Beautiful in the 1970s.  Send your thoughts. 

Below is the proposal we'll be making based on the "Keep America Beautiful" anti-litter campaign of the 1970s.  We are aware that the funding of the KAB was in part to promote an alternative to more successful container deposit laws, but the promotion of doing the right thing out of conscience is not at all inconsistent with promotion of doing the right thing for a nickel deposit compensation.

How might "Keep Atlantic Beautiful" work in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana and other nations with large cities on the coast?

2008 R2 Version 1 Is a Public Document. Certify That You Conform To It

The original Responsible Recycler Version 1 was a public document. EPA in Washington DC paid a professional mediator, John Lingelbach, to host a series of meetings with environmental stakeholders and experts (myself included) to get a standard that ANAB and ANSI could ok various professional auditors, such as Orion Registrars or Perry Johnson Registrars to certify.

Here is a link to the original R2 V1 document, which is now very difficult to find online. I had to use the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (and I left them a donation, it's a really cool utility).

Conforming to a public standard is something a small recycling business can do without any legal third party, such as SERI or E-Stewards, taking a financial cut. You cannot claim to be certified BY that third party, and you don't get a certificate with a gold star. But you can pay for the exact same person, the exact same auditor, to come and audit your status as certifyable to your conformance to the 2008 standard. 

The Versioin 2 of the R2 standard arguably made no changes at all to the Version 1 other than make it a non-public, copyrighted standard. And that was more than arguably due to the financial interests of the certification organization that John Lingelbach formed in order to make a living and hire people to "maintain" the standard. And they do "Maintain" it, and ANAB and ANSI may or may not add value that ISO (which you have to also adhere to in order to get R2 certification) doesn't give you anyway.

Oliver Franklin-Wallis' New Book, "WasteLand" Pre-Read

First a disclaimer - one cannot review, fairly, a book which one has yet to read. I have only read the electronics recycling chapter published in The Guardian, which features in part WR3A member Evans Quaye, who Oli spent time with in Accra.

Evans honestly has one of the most modest shops in Ghana, but he did an excellent job of convincing Mr. Franklin-Wallis that the "export bad" story was not remotely fair to Africa's Tech Sector. The chapter ends not with so much a conclusion, but a confusion... cognitive dissonance isn't the ultimate success, but in The Guardian's Environmental newsroom, it represents incredible progress. Oli gets an A.

Another chapter of Wasteland was positively reviewed last week at The New Yorker. I had to have a follow up chat with Oli when when I got halfway through the New Yorker review by Elizabeth Kolbert @ElizKolbert).

Her concluding paragraphs include a very fair analysis by Oli Franklin-Wallis, which for The Guardian Environment standards deserves an A+. The next to last paragraph of the New Yorker article -

There are also practical hurdles. Precisely because plastic is now ubiquitous, it’s difficult to imagine how to replace all of it, or even much of it. Even in cases where substitutes are available, it’s not always clear that they’re preferable. Franklin-Wallis cites a 2018 study by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency which analyzed how different kinds of shopping bags compare in terms of life-cycle impacts. The study found that, to have a lower environmental impact than a plastic bag, a paper bag would have to be used forty-three times and a cotton tote would have to be used an astonishing seventy-one hundred times. “How many of those bags will last that long?” Franklin-Wallis asks. Walker-Franklin and Jambeck also note that exchanging plastic for other materials may involve “tradeoffs,” including “energy and water use and carbon emissions.” When Schaub’s supermarket stopped handing out plastic shopping bags, it may have reduced one problem only to exacerbate others—deforestation, say, or pesticide use.

Very fair. But the New Yorker article is titled "How Plastics are Poisoning Us", and it's hard to get to the end of the article without thinking it's based on Penn and Teller's 2004 "Recycling is BS" The LAST paragraph bears Elizabeth Kolbert's conclusion.

It also wasn’t all that long ago that we got along just fine without Coca-Cola or packaged guacamole or six-ounce bottles of water or takeout everything. To make a significant dent in plastic waste—and certainly to “end plastic pollution”—will probably require not just substitution but elimination.

It is hard for me to imagine that readers of this New Yorker article are more likely to wash out their plastic bottles and recycle them. And my fear is that it's a perfect recipe for the current state of affairs - conspiracy theories, shaming, suspicion - that young people may throw recycling as a practice in the rubbish bin as an "ok boomer" moral licensing scheme.  If the defending recycling is complicated, convenience becomes the enemy, and there's nothing more convenient than giving up.

It seems to those of us in the recycling industry that most coverage of recycling is dismissive or downright anti-recycling, but that coverage of the only alternatives - mining, petrorefining, and forestry - is too rare. It's less costly for a reporter to get to a city dump - Agbogbloshie is 20 minutes from the airport, 10 from Movenpick hotel - but the publisher or photojournalist gets the same "exotic Africa" credit as if they had visited Kabwe, or the mining portrayed in Siddharth Kara's "Cobalt Red".