African Consumers Movement and COMESA in Critical plans to end plastic pollution. Joseph Mukasa is visibly a young man in his early twenties. He wakes up every morning to join hundreds of his fellow young people in collecting littered plastic bottles around the Metropolitan districts of Kampala, and Wakiso in Uganda.
The young people pile the bottles into sacks and deliver them to waiting trucks, which then take them to recycling plants.
With this heavy plastic pollution problem in their face, the COMESA Competition Commission and the African Consumers movement are working to close lobbying gaps in ensuring consumers’ voices are included in the global plastic pollution treaty, currently being pushed by the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) to be in place at least by 2024.
Micheal Mungoma, the Director of Programs at Youth Education Network (YED) an organization in Kenya speaking during a session at the Consumer International Congress in Nairobi Kenya.
African Consumers Movement and COMESA in Critical plans to end plastic pollution.
Micheal Mungoma, the Director of Programs at Youth Education Network (YED) an organization in Kenya speaking during a session at the Consumer International Congress in Nairobi Kenya.Courtesy
COMESA and the African Consumers’ movement are particularly interested in having a switch from plastic water bottles to glass bottles, and having strict adherence to recycling by industries still producing plastics.
United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) is the world’s highest-level decision-making body for matters related to the environment, with a universal membership of all 193 Member States.
African Consumers Movement and COMESA in Critical plans to end plastic pollution. Environmental experts and officials of different consumer protection associations in Africa who spoke to The New Times underscored the need to reduce plastic production, eliminate single-use and short-lived plastic products, and switch to non-plastic substitutes.
“We are working closely with COMESA in addressing this problem, because what is evident is that our voices are not heard at the global level in lobbying for issues affecting the lives of our consumers like plastic pollution.
Governments all over the world should force industries to recycle the plastics they produce,” said Damien Ndizeye, the Executive Director of the Rwanda Consumer Rights Protection Organisation (ADECOR)
