Panick as China stops import of recycled plastics

Ugandan traders fear losses but Coca-Cola offers hope

Kampala, Uganda | RONALD MUSOKE | A trader without a market now; that is Peter Musiige, the manager of a small plant that has been exporting recycled plastics to China. He lost his market when the Chinese government on Jan.01 started implementing a worldwide ban it announced on July 20 last year.

Musiige told The Independent on Jan.12 that his company, Aquila Investment, was established primarily with the Chinese market in mind.  Located on the edge of Uganda’s biggest garbage landfill at Kiteezi, 20km north of Kampala City, it has been exporting about 50 tonnes of recycled plastic materials to China every month and earning Musiige hundreds of thousands of dollars in return.

Asked what he plans to do following the Chinese ban, Musiige is clear: “If the Chinese government ban continues, I am sure we will get out of business,” he said as he stared at piles of plastic mineral and soda bottles strewn all over the company’s yard.

He added: “The Chinese have been a very big market for us. The challenge we have now is that we no longer have a market.”

George William Munobe is another dealer in plastic waste at the Kiteezi landfill. He is a medium scale dealer who, for the last four years, has been buying from wholesalers and selling to recycling plants like Aquila.

He told The Independent that the plastic waste market fell around November last year when a company he has been selling plastics in bulk to got communication that China would not be taking any plastics anymore.

Before that, he was buying a tonne of plastic bottles at Shs 350,000 and selling it at around Shs 550,000.  The market for plastic mineral water bottles has since gone downward. A kilogramme of empty plastic mineral bottles which was selling at Shs 600 before then now goes for half that price.

But unlike Musiige, Munobe remains optimistic.

“I am worried because I am not working as I used to but I hope the new market (India) will soon pick-up,” he says.

“Everything here (Kiteezi) is valuable,” Munobe says pointing at young women and men sifting through the filth and putting away any “dirty gold” they find. Above them vultures hover in the sky and around them, marabou storks and stray dogs too get into action searching for a meal.

It is a busy scene with a bulldozer dancing through mountains of garbage which has just been delivered by a truck.  It levels and spreads it widely simplifying the task for the hundreds of eager women and men who elbow one another as they jostle to pick the latest assortment of valuable garbage from Kampala City and neighbouring towns.

They fight over everything: cardboards, metal cuttings, broken glasses to a kaleidoscope of polythene bags and plastic bottles. But from the piles of plastic bottles mounted on either side of the road to the landfill, plastic bottles are the most sought after, thanks to the ready market for them.

In fact, the plastics recycling industry in Uganda, which is largely informal, has been growing and some estimates value it at about $10 million.

It has been responsible for eliminating waste material from urban drainage channels but also creating jobs for thousands of Ugandans who would otherwise be unemployed. These include those who pick the plastic bottle irresponsibly thrown about to the ones who package the final product destined for China. Many of these now fear for their future without jobs.

Joel Mwesigye, a KCCA engineer permanently stationed at Kiteezi landfill says business is now down.

“The piles of plastic waste you see over there are yet to be purchased because the demand is not as high,” he says, “The sellers seem to be stuck with their stocks. When the Chinese are buying, there are no stockpiles.”

Ambrose Nuwagira, the senior education, information and communication officer of the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) also told The Independent that China’s ban is a blow to those who have been earmarking the country as an export destination.

The Independent did a weeklong investigation and, as expected, Uganda’s plastic recyclers are already in panic mode, not knowing what they will do with the mountains of plastic waste in their yards which they had stocked for processing to export to China.

But reactions to the Chinese ban are not uniform.

When The Independent recently visited Plastics Recycling Industries in Nakawa Division on the eastern side of Kampala city, we found youthful workers clad in their blue and black overalls busy working in the mid-afternoon sweltering temperatures.

As the machines gobbled and shredded the plastic bottles, outside the plant’s entrance, we observed the young men and women moving in heaps of thousands of empty plastic bottles in various sizes—from half a litre bottles to five litres ones.