SERREKUNDA — Everyone who enters the Bakoteh landfill, the largest in Gambia, greets Mustapha Kanyi, who gestures in return and exchanges a few words.
“Everyone who makes a living here has to pass through here. There are about 30 permanent workers and another 200 who come and go, taking advantage of the opportunity to do more things in other parts of the country,” he says, sitting on a plastic chair under a tarp that protects him from the burning sun. A sea of plastic begins just a few meters away and stretches to the horizon, so far that one cannot even see where it ends.
“I have been in charge of this landfill for six years. But the place actually opened almost 40 years ago. It has changed since. For example, we didn’t have walls before. Now they surround the entire landfill, which is 44 acres wide. They were put up in 2020,” he continues.
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The Bakoteh landfill is in Serrekunda, the largest city in Gambia, about 6 miles from Banjul, the capital. Gambia is the smallest non-island nation in Africa, and its population barely reaches 2.7 million people. Located in western Africa, it is surrounded by Senegal except for its coastline along the Atlantic Ocean. Its territory flanks the river with which it shares its name, and which crosses the nation from end to end before flowing into the ocean.
The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) ranks Gambia as the 20th poorest country in the world. Almost 50% of the population lives below the poverty line: the annual per capita income is $2,390 for men and just $1,790 for women.
Gambia is a net importer of plastics. The UN estimates that 1,760 tons of plastics arrive in the country annually. To make things worse, an average of 770 tons of municipal solid waste are produced here every day, 9% of which is plastic.
About 84% of this waste is not managed properly: communities have no choice but to open unauthorized dumpsites to burn waste, often in overcrowded places, causing health problems, pollution of the river, its tributaries and its mangrove forest as well as economic losses.
Plastics by the shipload
At the Bakoteh landfill, which is legal, Kanyi shares some figures confirming the disaster: “When they opened it, there were no houses around. No one lived there. Now, it is completely different: There are schools, houses… and 90% of the children in the neighborhood have asthma. But we are finding solutions. Fires are now more rare, we have created two roads, one from north to south and the other from west to east, to control the flames.”
There isn’t much else we can do.
Kanyi also explains that plastics and tires are the most abundant in the landfill.
“Shiploads of tires arrive from Europe or China and they all end up here. We receive about 1,000 every day, but burning them would be very toxic. There are already about 2 million in the landfill. We have buried half of them, although we know that they take up to 1,000 years to decompose. There isn’t much else we can do,” he says.
Dozens of people come to Bakoteh every day in search of metals with which to do business, he says, adding that it is difficult to find a second life or a new lucrative activity for other materials. “Nobody has shown interest in recycling bags or tires. It would be nice to find someone who can make some profit out of it, but for now…”
Yahya Jammeh, the former dictator who ruled Gambia with an iron fist for more than two decades (he came to power in 1994, was ousted in 2016 and fled to Guinea), had implemented several laws, such as the Anti-Litter Regulation of 2008 or a law of 2015 making manufacturers responsible for the recovery and recycling of plastic bags. But the scarcity of resources meant that local initiatives have worked better and received more recognition.
The recycling queen
The most famous is probably the initiatives promoted by the activist Isatou Ceesay, colloquially known as the Queen of Recycling. She was born in 1972 and at only 17 years old, she created a movement that today allows about 350 women from her village to generate income by selling products made from discarded materials.
“My father was a refugee from Mali. He only got the hardest jobs, so my family had very few opportunities here. So I asked myself: what can I use to make money? And the answer was: plastic.” Ceesay thought collecting the abandoned plastic and turning it into bags or baskets to sell at local markets could be a good idea.
“Many people thought I would fail and didn’t take me seriously. But I started making money and things changed,” she says. From this seed grew the Women’s Initiative Gambia (WIG), the NGO that Ceesay now presides over.
I would say that plastic pollution is one of the biggest problems in Gambia.
“Men wanted their wives to depend on them, so we started training local women. We went to landfills to look for materials that could be converted into something valuable. The companies that generate plastic do it only for business; nobody thinks about the people who live here,” she says.
Ceesay’s success is unquestionable. Her method has been replicated in different countries; in 2012 she was given the International Alliance for Women’s Difference Maker Award in Washington; various organizations from around the world have supported her initiatives and her story has been made into a picture book, One Plastic Bag.
Yet Ceesay believes there is still much to be done and that the fight against plastic and waste in Gambia still has a long way to go. She has launched two new projects: charcoal from organic waste to fight deforestation; and sanitary pads from sustainable materials.
“When they have their period, some girls are teased by their classmates and do not go to school for a whole week. I spoke to seamstresses and tailors and that is our next goal, to give adolescents the opportunity to improve their hygiene in a sustainable and affordable way,” she says.
The importance of the sea
If plastic is part of daily life on land, the situation is not much different on the beaches and surrounding areas. And the sea is of vital importance to Gambians.
With an aquifer surface area of 2,100 square kilometers (810 square miles) and 43 miles of coastline, its fishing resources are abundant and vital for a large part of the population, as the protein from fish meat is a real plus for the inhabitants of a country that is too dependent on agriculture and where 30% of the population suffers from malnutrition.
The situation on the Gambian coast is a snapshot of what is happening in the rest of the world.
“I would say that plastic pollution is one of the biggest problems in Gambia. It damages the marine ecosystem, microplastics end up inside the fish, and it also does a lot of damage to plants,” says Musa Bojang, a 31-year-old local biologist, climate activist and leader of the Gunjur Youth Movement, an organization that fights for the protection of the biodiversity of Gunjur, an important coastal area, as well as the people who live off of it.
The situation on the Gambian coast is, in fact, a snapshot of what is happening in the rest of the world. The UN Environment Programme estimates that our oceans swallow up 8 billion tons of plastic waste every year and more than a million marine species die each year due to this pollution.
In Gambia, the freshwater current from the river estuary mainly attracts Bonga shad and sardinella, which feed and spawn here, but they are not the only species to suffer. In the very rich bird reserves that border the beaches, it is sadly very common to see different birds rummaging through plastic bags and bottles.
Bojang concludes: “We go to primary and secondary schools to raise awareness among students and we try to educate them about the importance of the sea. We also organize waste collection on our beaches with volunteers. But I think that for the moment, Gambia is not able to put an end to this problem.”
