Thread by @JamesWakibia

Often, I have been asked why people do not collect and make money from the plastic in the river, I tell them it is a hard & expensive task to do . Yesterday, I challenged myself- got into the water for one hour to see how much of the recyclable plastic waste I’d be able to gather

The exercise took me an hour. At the end of the one hour, and after managing to collect about 700 plastic bottles, I was only able to earn ksh100. Ultimate, I would have earned about ksh170 but the plastics were wet and dirty. Too much work, for so little!

Plastic waste is just trash that nobody wants to pick and that explains why its impact in the environment is so high. We need to put extra efforts to stop it from leaking into the environment and demand a mandatory deposit and return schemes for all plastic drink bottles.

Sadly, it is not just plastic drink bottles that are polluting our environment but all nature of plastic, like shoes, clothes, flip-flops, things that are extremely difficult to retrieve let alone to recycle. It calls on us all to be more mindful of our environment.

As the world negotiates a global #plasticstreaty, one of the thing that I would really like addressed is existing plastic waste, we need to get it out of the environment.

All photos by Bedan Mwihia

Here's a silent video of me at work at Njoro River in Nakuru. Now you know why those who collect waste for recycling are not interested with collecting plastic in our rivers.

I have documented plastic pollution at Njoro River since 2017. A lot of cleanups have been done but plastics keep flowing. This is the first tweet I made after encountering the sheer amounts of plastic floating in the river.