Goats and Soda: NPR

Gloria Majiga-Kamoto, an activist from Malawi, is one of six recipients of the 2021 Goldman Environmental Prize. Majiga-Kamoto lobbied to persuade Malawi to implement a ban on thin plastics.

Goldman Environmental Award

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Goldman Environmental Award

In June 2021, NPR profile Gloria Majiga-Kamoto of Malawi, who saw goats die after eating plastic bags and decided to take over his nation’s plastic industry. Cheap, single-use plastic is such a problem in Malawi that in 2015 the government enacted a ban on thin plastic. But before the ban took effect, the country’s powerful plastics industry filed for a ban. That is until Majiga-Kamoto, who works for a local environmental organization, arrives, organizing rallies and protests. In 2019, the country’s Supreme Court finally ruled in favor of the ban. In 2021 she has won the prestigious Goldman environmental award for her work. So what happened to her in the past year?

Gloria Majiga-Kamoto says that over the past year she has become – in her own words – “plastic girl”. We met her in Blantyre, Malawi’s financial capital, to get updates on the thin plastic ban and hear about her new tactics in fighting plastic pollution around the world. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Volunteers with Art Malawi, a local arts organization, clean up plastic waste and debris from the Mudi River in Blantyre, Malawi. Volunteers have been working for months to clean up the river.

Art Malawi / Mudi River Cleanup

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Art Malawi / Mudi River Cleanup

What does ‘plastic girl’ mean?

Being a ‘plastic girl’ is someone people send photos to if they see plastic pollution anywhere. [Laughs] Or they’re tagging me in everything. So it’s a bit down because it also reminds you how little progress you’re actually making. The problem with the policy is that, when it’s in place, you almost think things will magically work out, don’t you? But it’s progressing very slowly and sometimes, being stuck in the moment, slow motion, it’s a bit frustrating. You want to wake up today and know that things are very different. It was a bit overwhelming for me personally. I think saying, ‘What else can I do?’

The point of the law is to ban the production of thin plastics in Malawi. But it seems there are still thin plastic manufacturers operating in the country. What is happening to you and your supporters?

Now we are back in court. There has been an application for judicial review by one of the [plastic] companies with commercial courts, it’s crazy that this matter was settled in the Supreme Court.

What? [the plastic companies] competing is a list of banned plastics. So because that list is [being] has reviewed [the government] cannot target companies. Currently, the government can only target plastic distributors and users, which is a very difficult thing to do as they are only local Malawians.

We have called on the president to act because we cannot continue to use the courts. [Earlier this month] we had a national clean up day for civil society organizations. We took a stand and said, ‘We don’t get into cleanup because we can’t keep cleaning up other people’s messes.’ The whole point of the ban, the whole point of setting up the cleanup initiative, is to say that the ban is in place, we come together as one country and clean up.

But if we keep making plastic and then we’re still saying everyone should go out and clean up, that’s not fair because we’re cleaning up other people’s messes and [the manufacturers are] make a profit from it!

So now you don’t participate in government sponsored cleanup and protests as a symbol of your frustration with the government.

Right. So far, we have actually refused to participate in national cleanup campaigns, from this month until the president made a very clear statement about the need for the judiciary to solve the problem. this once and for all. We need him to give us instructions on implementing the ban.

Basically, you don’t want the government to clean up.

No. [Laughs] You know, we’re done.

I feel, if you are ‘plastic girl’, people all over the world will look to you for guidance on how to combat plastic pollution in their countries. So I’m wondering, can you give people some ideas on what you’ve learned?

We organized the cleanup with support from the Goldman Prize fund. And what we did is when we collected all the plastic, we took them straight to a plastic company, because we said, ‘we I don’t know what to do with this garbage. Therefore friend tell us what to do with it. You keep producing it, so get it back! ‘

We will do that for each cleanup. We give it back to the plastic manufacturers because we don’t want it. And we don’t know what to do with it. Don’t give us the task of writing proposals to come up with projects that will be recycled, because we can’t. Friend must do something about it. And I think [taking plastic waste back to the plastic companies] showed them that we’re watching and we’re waiting to see what happens.

I know globally, there’s been a campaign to go plastic-free. We are not the only country facing this challenge. This is a huge field. It has huge profits. They have money, they have more we will have. But we had strength and I think that was the most important lesson.

So when you return them the plastic, do they take it?

They were very reluctant, but we got there with the media and then they had to withdraw. We don’t know what they did with it, but it’s a strong statement.

I think their fear is that if they take it, then people will start taking all their plastic for them when they clean up. And that’s exactly what we wanted! [Laughs.]

So we tried to tell people that if you’re cleaning, you need to have a plan for your plastic because you can’t just throw it in the landfill. The type of pressure is showing [the thin plastic manufacturers] that we do not back down.

It shows hypocrisy, how you really can’t recycle a lot of plastic.

Exactly.

What is your next goal?

We still have a lot of work to do in the plastics sector. I mean, even [if] The ban is in effect again, there will be a lot of work to be done for people to change. We’re doing a TV show called Wasteful talk, it will be broadcast live next month. Just 10 minutes a day, a conversation about the types of waste you go through. Helping people understand what waste is, how they can better manage it, who they can actually bring it to, and the incredible people who are managing waste on our behalf.

So you’re focusing on human behavior in addition to targeting manufacturers.

I feel like one of the challenges we have is disconnection – once you throw [plastic] in the bin you are disconnected from it.

So I always ask people, if we’re in a meeting and they have a plastic bottle, I say, “After you use that bottle, can you imagine seeing that bottle again? Like if you had one? your name on it and you met it inside an animal or, you know, in the most awkward place, in a fish, in a beautiful lake when you were swimming with your family and then you looked see your bottle drifting ashore towards you. How would you feel?” So people are aware that waste has a life cycle and we are part of it until the end of it. .

Julia Simon is a regular contributor to NPR podcasts and news desks, focusing on climate change, energy and business news.