The country of 104 million people – where 67% of the waste “are not managed properly” according to the World Bank – has pledged to halve its single-use plastic consumption by 2030.
But before that, young environmentalists and engineers have decided to use plastic waste right away: the former take it out of the waters of the Nile and the latter make bricks of it, a green alternative to cement and its heavy carbon footprint.
The 5.4 million tons of plastic waste produced each year in Egypt often ends up in illegal landfills that flow into the Nile and the Mediterranean where they poison aquatic fauna.
More plastic than fish
More than three quarters of the fish caught in Cairo in Africa’s largest river contain micro plastic particles, a study published in 2020 warns. Egyptian Oceanography and Fisheries. In Cairo, on the island of Qoursaya, to make ends meet, fishermen have started to fill their nets with plastic.
Hany Fawzy, project manager at VeryNile, a project supported by the Ministry of the Environment, buys “between ten and 12 tonnes of plastic each month” to 65 fishermen who collect and sort waste from their boats. The plastic is then compressed and then recycled or incinerated as fuel in a cement factory in the South.
According to the OECD, less than 10% of plastic in the world is recycled, in particular because of the difficulty or the cost of the process. Many plastic products – and more particularly laminated flexible packaging such as packets of crisps – are “composed of different layers of plastic and aluminum that are almost impossible to separate and therefore recycle”told AFP Khaled Raafat, co-founder of the start-up TileGreen.
“Most of the time this plastic with no or very little value ends up in landfills, incinerated or in our environment, our seas and our rivers”adds his partner Amr Shalan.
A drop in the ocean
Behind him, a crusher swallows plastic to spit it out in the form of dark-colored bricks “twice as strong as concrete”boasts Mr. Rafaat, throwing one on the ground.
“Only 11 to 15% of plastic waste is recycled in Egypt each year. We work with recycling companies and recover what they cannot use”, says Shalan. A brick, he says, is 125 plastic bags. TileGreen has already produced 40,000 and aims to have recycled between three and five billion plastic bags by 2025.
But that will surely still not be enough. According to the OECD, annual plastic production is expected to triple by 2060 to 1.2 billion tonnes. At the same time, another figure will double: that of the 100 million tonnes of plastic waste not recycled or abandoned in nature each year.
“Plastic is not going to disappear. With their initiatives, they created a market and saw that there was clearly demand”analyzes Mohamed Kamal, co-director of Greenish, who helped create VeryNile. “Anything that creates value from waste in Egypt is a step forward”he hammers. “But we stay on the surface and that does not solve the basic problem”.