Ethiopia is moving toward a broader ban on single-use plastics, after years in which a thinner rule was widely ignored. Solid waste proclamation 513/2007 already bars the manufacture, import, and use of plastic bags at or below 0.03 millimetres thick, and it calls for biodegradable plastics. A monitoring effort with the Climate Change Commission and the Addis Ababa environmental authority found the industry much larger than the inspections that caught up with it. Since 2015, at least 486 plastic makers were recorded in Addis Ababa, with a registered capital of 10 billion birr. Of 21 manufacturers checked, 14 had made bags below the legal thickness and were warned. Two years later, 11 more factories were inspected and some still failed. About 80 water bottlers were also tied to bottles littering the city and its outskirts.
Girma Gemechu, director of solid and hazardous waste compliance at the Climate Change Commission, told The Reporter that a new law was heading to parliament. Public hearings and talks with manufacturers had been held. The House of Peoples’ Representatives was expected to act early the following year. Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and others had already banned shopping bags. United Nations Environment figures cited in the report put global use at a million plastic bottles a minute and five trillion single-use bags a year.
Chemist and consultant Sisay Kifle argued that a ban is not a worked-out answer. He said government, factories, and shoppers all mishandle waste, and that the thickness rule was never enforced properly. He also said biodegradable substitutes cost more and can depend on grain, and that nobody had shown they break down quickly in Ethiopia’s climate. In 2017 he wrote a guide on turning used plastic into income and jobs. The commission’s draft and his objection were the two poles of the June debate: a law that would stop thin bags at the factory gate, and a warning that enforcement, not another proclamation, was the missing piece.
Sources: The Reporter