The East African Legislative Assembly (EALA) has called on the East African Community (EAC) Council of Ministers to instruct Partner States to allocate sufficient resources for researching and developing alternatives to single-use plastic materials.

The assembly made this recommendation during its meeting in Kigali on December 5, as it adopted a report of its Committee on Agriculture, Tourism, and Natural Resources on the oversight activity on the control and management of single-use plastic materials in the EAC region.

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While presenting the committee report, MP Thoar Gatpa Gideon, from South Sudan, said its members observed, among other things, that research, development, and incentives to investors will enable the production of affordable and reliable alternatives to single-use plastic materials.

The committee, he said, realised that while single-use plastic materials contribute to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Partner States and create employment opportunities, they are used once and discarded, causing pollution and breaking down into smaller pieces in landfills where they may take up to hundreds of years to degrade, leaching potentially toxic substances into the soil and water.

According to the report, all EAC Partner States have a form of ban on plastic materials (carrier bags, seals, and packaging), albeit with a different level of enforcement.

Rwanda, it added, is an example of the enforcement of a law on the control of single-use plastic materials in the EAC region.

The Council of Ministers was urged to direct Partner States to ban all single-use plastic materials — and not just plastic carrier bags and seals — and to prepare a regional action plan and strategies to eliminate single-use plastic materials.

Single-use plastics are products made mainly from fossil fuel-based chemicals (petrochemicals) and are intended to be discarded after a single use. Only nine per cent of the world’s plastics are recycled or re-used.

The report pointed out that over 400 million tonnes of plastic are produced every year, while 10 million tonnes of plastic are dumped into oceans annually, endangering aquatic life including fish — and eventually, the lives of humans who consume seafood. That is equal to a truckload of garbage every minute.

MP Kayonga Caroline Rwivanga, from Rwanda, said half of the plastics produced globally are designed to be used once, citing common water plastic bottles — indicating that they can only be recycled twice.

"We would like to get to a point where we use glass bottles, and not plastic. But the problem is that economically, the alternative packaging (glass bottle) that is being proposed is very expensive,” she said, pointing out that the main reason is that it is not being used widely.

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All East African countries currently have some form of ban, and Kayonga noted that this indicates a certain level of awareness and calls for coordinated efforts to achieve better results.

"For that ban to be enforced, it needs collaboration. Plastic pollution knows no borders,” she said, citing plastics in water bodies such as Lake Kivu and Lake Victoria.

MP Shogo Richard Mlozi, from Tanzania, commended all the EAC Partner States for taking the initiative to address the issue of single-use plastic materials.

However, she pointed out, except for Rwanda, the issue of enforcement of laws and implementation of different policies and strategies has been a major challenge for most of the Partner States, "in which over time, we have not seen a significant change in the situation.”

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For her, a circular economy — a model involving efficient resource use which includes recycling and reusing — is one of the means to address the single-use plastic issue.

"The current linear model that we have of produce, consume, and throw, needs to stop. We need to transition to a circular economic model. But we cannot do that without being innovative. So, we need innovation, but at the same time, we need an adequate legal framework that will be able to address different gaps that will be contextual based, and nationally based,” Mlozi said, pointing out that a report by the World Bank shows that circular model could address the problem by 40 to 50 per cent by 2050.