The road to solutions: Creative companies in Sierra Leone tackle plastic pollution

It was a devastating mudslide in Freetown, Sierra Leone, that opened the eyes of then 18-year-old Alhaji Siraj Bah to the environmental issues faced by his community. In August 2017, after days of torrential rain, a portion of Sugar Loaf Mountain broke off and buried a nearby informal settlement, killing over 1,000 people, including most of Bah’s adoptive family.

This tragedy was exacerbated by flooding and erosion, caused by improper waste management and deforestation. Now Bah, at the age of 20, is the founder of a company, Rugsal Trading, that tackles both issues. His company creates more environmentally friendly paper bags to replace the ubiquitous plastic bags used in Freetown, in addition to briquettes made out of coconut husks, to replace charcoal made from illegal logging.

Bah isn’t the only young entrepreneur in Sierra Leone taking on waste management and plastic pollution.

Sahr Emmanuel Joseph, the business lead at Kangama Trading, was working as a consultant when he came across the idea to start a recycling company.

“In one of my research activities I was working for the Ministry of Health,” says Joseph. “And I came to realize that most of the issues that we are having in our community, malaria and other waterborne diseases, was from our lack of understanding of how we should manage our waste.”

Poorly managed plastic waste often ends up clogging drains, causing water to stagnate and creating a breeding ground for malaria-carrying mosquitos. Waste management is more than just an environmental issue, it’s a public health problem.

Similarly, Emmanuel Mac-Boima started his company, Shae Recycling, after noticing the large piles of garbage around his community and wanting to find a solution, while Abu Bakarr Kargbo quit his job in the mining sector to start Global Recycling Company, which manufactures paving tiles out of recycled plastic bottles.

Although they all came upon their business ideas in different ways, one thing these entrepreneurs have in common is that they saw a problem in their communities, and instead of looking away, they decided to tackle it.

Aside from some city bylaws, Sierra Leone has very limited waste management legislation on the books, and the municipal governments lack the resources to operate robust waste management programs, let alone recycling.

That’s why when Mac-Boima kept walking past heaps of trash in his community on his way to and from work, he didn’t ignore the issue. “I realized that the ministry or the government institution that is responsible for handling that kind of rubbish, which is the Freetown City Council, don’t have enough capacity, and they are underutilized, and they don’t have enough resources,” says Mac-Boima. “That’s why the idea or the inspiration came to me: what can we do, or what can I do as an individual?”

Mac-Boima’s company, Shae Recycling, began offering a service to households: for a very small fee, local youth will collect their organic and non-recyclable waste. Although it took some convincing, Mac-Boima says people have slowly become more receptive to the idea, once they recognize the positive health impacts and job-creation benefits. And community members can actually get paid for the plastic waste they hand over to Shae employees because there’s a nascent market for it.

Shae Recycling, Global Recycling Company, and Kangama Trading all use a similar formula to make tiles and paving bricks out of used plastic bottles and sand. This has created a lot of casual labour jobs, because unemployed people can collect plastic bottles around the city and sell them by the bag.

A girl collects plastic waste, and men lay bricks made from plastic waste combined with sand.

“The attitude of Sierra Leoneans is changing, slowly, gradually, because now people know they don’t have to throw away their plastics, there are people who will buy it,” says Joseph of Kangama Trading. “Once people understand that firstly there is a danger to leaving plastics around, and then people see value in the plastics … Then the attitudes will change.”

The coordinated efforts of these companies with similar products and missions has helped to raise awareness and get public buy-in for addressing waste problems.

“One of the key fundamental challenges in the business world is transfer of knowledge,” says Mac-Boima. “Within my three years of experience in the business sector, I realize that I have made a lot of mistakes and I have made a lot of positive steps.”

The companies hold semi-regular meetings to discuss their challenges and help each other out. “As much as we’re all offering the same services, indirectly, we try as much as possible to support each other so at the end of the day we can build a whole industry together, because it’s not a one-man thing,” Mac-Bomia continues. “One person cannot create the change.”

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Olivia Rempel is a journalist and filmmaker based in Montreal, Canada. You can follow her on Instagram and Twitter.