Share the Scare from Plastic Collection from Urban Wastewater: Hygiene is Paramount

A caution about our plastic litter "offset" project in Cameroon...

While we remain proud of the success documented by University of Cameroun researchers, as profiled in Recycling Today, I found out yesterday that we owe several words of caution. For decades, African city canals have suffered pollution and diseases associated with raw sewage.

For published peer reviewed articles on the subject, google our lead researcher, Dr. Asi Quiggle Atud et. al.

• Abundance Dynamic of Oocysts in the Groundwater of Mbankomo, a Sub-urban Area Yaounde: Physico-chemical Factors and Health Risk
• Distribution of Cryptosporidium and Cyclospora in the Soil Around the Wells and Springs in Yaounde and Environs: Role of Some Abiotic Factors of the Medium
• Biomonitoring of drinking water (springs) in the sub-urban areas of Centre Region (Cameroon): Microsporidies and quality of water

So glad we partnered with experts rather than diving in, so to speak, with informal sector workers.

While the "bang for the buck" cost of diverting ocean-bound plastic in early rainy season was strongly demonstrated, four of the workers suffered bacterial illness afterwards. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7126130/

https://www.in.gov/health/eph/onsite-sewage-systems-program/diseases-involving-sewage/

The disease risks involving city sewage in emerging markets are one of the reasons we are working with the University of Cameroun, Yaounde, rather than with the so-called "informal sector" in this second stage.

Had I followed my first impulses and thrown funding at informal sector workers, we might not have any means to study the correlation with bacterial illness suffered by four of our nine Enprosa Action workers who cleaned up the plastic litter in Yaounde, Limbe, and Douala.

As with #GeeksofColor accused of dumping electronics, we have to recognize that these are Africans taking risks to their personal health to provide a better future for their society. It's another case of the perfect being the enemy of the good, but also a call to constantly improve and leave no environmental soldiers behind.

I was frightened by the news of the hospitalization of Dr. Asi. He is in many ways the splitting image of his father, my landlord from 1984-86 in Ngaoundal, Cameroon. His dad tragically died when Dr. Asi was still a boy.  Now I have to #ShareTheScare and document the need for PPE and santization after every exposure to the city water.

The concerns Fair Trade Recycling was asked to address when pitching the project to other funders were, in hindsight, funnelling OECD concerns from a western moral gravity silo.

- Would the plastic really be recycled?

- Would the diversion be "greenwashed" or double-counted?

- Would the low prevailing wages be ostracized by critics? 

- Would the plastic be exported to another country and dumped in the sea again?

These and other real concerns I heard from Europeans and Americans I was confident about prior to the trial. The plastic Dr. Asi Quiggle photographed in his 2021 report, coalescing in the city canals, was definitely going to be washed to sea. It was definitely NOT IMPORTED RECYCLED PLASTIC from BIR and ISRI recyclers (the "recycling is dumping" collateral damage has gotten way out of the loony bin).  This seemed obvious, and Dr. Asi and the Enprosa Action team did an outstanding job of demonstrating a "cost" or "market" approach to ocean litter prevention.

But the personal connection I had to Dr. Asi Q gave me chills when he told me he had to go to the hospital to treat bacterial infections after the study. 

Suddenly this gets real. My western critic concerns must take a back seat. What costs should we be funding up front to guarantee the safety of the workers? Zoe Lenkiewitcz at the UNEP, original founder of WasteAid, had shared this type of concern with me years ago.

My barometer remains that the worst recycling is better than the best virgin material production. The health and safety risks from pumping more Nigerian crude oil to manufacture more virgin plastic is hardly a risk free endeavor, but it too is market-driven. 

We have to compete with it while understanding that diverting raw materials out of CITIES is more likely to be photographed and criticized than a remote oil spill or coltan mining in Wagner-policed rain forest mines.

Would the world be better off is the Enprosa Action Team had not diverted these tons of plastic litter from the ocean into sorted bales and bricks?  And would the people who can be employed to divert the litter at roughly $0.36 per hour otherwise be at risk of bacterial disease in urban waterways?

Paying people in a higher risk "silo" is still better, in my book, than leaving those people awash in litter, beside polluted waterways, and paying other people to despoil more of the earth extracting virgin material.  

Environmentalists like Dr. Asi's team, Waste Aid, Fair Trade Recycling, and private recycling companies are like battlefield medics.  If we spend too much time gazing at one fallen soldier's navel wound, we might never reach another fallen comrade. We have to prioritize risks, even when that means "stepping over the bodies".

The cost effectiveness of the collection and sorting of the different types of plastic is still strongly evidenced as promising more diversion potential in a "litter offset" model.  And this program can hardly be described as "offshoring" litter collection in more expensive OECD nations.  Or rather, it is "offshoring" in a positive way as compared to picking the plastic off beaches and fishing it out of the oceans post rainy season.

I for one will keep recycling, and keep doing LCA Life Cycle Analysis and working outside my OECD silo. But I had to take this time to "share the scare".