Recycling Discarded Flip-Flops

The once-pristine Nyongo Sharif beach along Kenya’s northern coast seems an unlikely dumping ground for the world’s plastic garbage. But the Somali upwelling, a powerful current, sometimes tosses rubbish onto the beach from as far away as Indonesia; and when the current reverses course, it hurls another load up from Southern Africa, as far afield as Mozambique.

High in the list of flotsam is one of the most ubiquitous and least noticed symbols of modern society: the flip flop.

“Flip-flops are a global problem, just one indicator of the myriad rubbish in the sea, which we are treating as the world’s dumping ground,” Julie Church, a marine biologist, said recently by telephone from Nairobi. “Tons and tons and tons of plastic waste, including flip-flops, flow down rivers and clog drainage systems, and animals are swallowing them,” she said.

Looking for at least a partial solution, Ms. Church has started a company making toys and gifts from reclaimed flip-flop plastic, for sale in eco-fashion boutiques in the United States.

Ms. Church said the piles of washed-up flip-flops on the shoreline were preventing protected hawksbill and green turtles from leaving the sea to nest. And a report issued in October by the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation flagged a risk of chemicals in the plastic that could be harmful to human health.

Flip-flops are just part, though a significant part, of a rising tide of plastic litter stretching down the East African coastline from Somalia to South Africa. Last year, the United Nations Environmental Program inventoried the growing problem of marine litter in the region. The survey of eight countries, including Kenya, showed that plastics made up from 80 percent to 89 percent of the waste stream, with the most developed countries the worst affected

Some countries in the region are starting to grapple with the plastic tide. But public awareness of the problem is low, particularly concerning the dangers to health from open burning. In Tanzania, people are not only burning plastics, they are storing food and water in discarded plastic waste packaging, including PVC containers that leach chemicals. If, as is often the case, the containers have been used to hold toxic products, like pesticides, the risks are even higher, said Silvani Silvani Mng’anya, an environmental and public health activist in Dar es Salaam.

Back in northern Kenya, flip-flops are now also arriving by air. Ms. Church receives boxes of flip-flops that have washed up on the beaches of San Diego and Hawaii. Her company, UniquEco, turns them into butterfly key rings, and large sculptures of monkeys for chic eco-boutiques in New York City.

This year, Ms. Church estimates that she will recycle 15 tons of rubber and plastic sandals. A mere drop in the swelling ocean of east Africa’s plastic refuse, but nonetheless a start.

Story courtesy of - The New York Times.
Photo courtesy of - Google Images.