Keep Tanzania Beautiful

If anything could rouse me to road rage, it was the sight of someone tossing an empty food container or bottle out of a bus or car. We saw it all the time in Tanzania, and often our car had to swerve to miss trash that bounced onto the road. Tons of garbage had been left to rot in ditches and curbs along the highways.

Fortunately, the momentum for recycling was gathering steam when we lived in Dar. Students at the international school found a local company that collected discarded paper and cardboard every week, and the American and British Embassies started sending shredded paper to the Wonder Welders—a group of local craftsmen who used it to make fancy writing paper and greeting cards. NGOs like the Corona Women’s Society collected glass bottles for a budding crafts industry that made decorative beads from recycled glass.

Informal recycling had gone on for years in countries like Tanzania and Ivory Coast. Garbage collectors and peddlers would sift through rubbish and pick out items that merchants might buy. We saw mounds of glass and plastic bottles behind the compound walls of Tanzanian homes. Vendors who sold them by the ton or kilo collected the glass and plastic periodically. I met one Chinese businessman who told me that he paid people for plastic bottles which he shipped to China to be made into products like polypropylene jackets and clothing.

But the governments needed to formalize the recycling process so people would know where to recycle their rubbish on a regular basis. A year before we left Tanzania, they outlawed cheap plastic bags in Zanzibar and elsewhere on the mainland, perhaps because empty plastic bags in ditches and trees were hurting the tourist industry.

It would take a media campaign equivalent to Smokey the Bear in the U.S. to convince people that it was in their interest to keep their country beautiful—for their own sakes and that of their children and not just for tourists.

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Bottles to Beads