Fair Trade Recycling raises funds for African plastic diversion effort

Fair Trade Recycling, a Middlebury, Vermont-based export reform conservation group dedicated to forging partnerships in emerging markets, says a $1,500 donation it organized spurred a pilot project in Cameroon that resulted in the collection of about 4.24 tons of plastic scrap.

The project, designed to find affordable ways to collect plastic and divert it from the world’s waterways, came about in part because of a reunion between Fair Trade Recycling co-founder Robin Ingenthron and a university researcher in Cameroon whom Ingenthron had met decades earlier as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Ingenthron met the project’s lead researcher, Dr. Asi Quiggle Atud, during Ingenthron’s Peace Corps posting to Ngaoundal, Cameroon, when Asi was 5 years old. “His father was my landlord and we shared a compound,” the recycler says.

When they reunited on Facebook 35 years later, Asi “was a month from being awarded his Ph.D in Urban Wastewater Management,” Ingenthron says.

Having made the reunion, Ingenthron organized the $1,500 donation via his own company, Good Point Recycling, with help from a GoFundMe campaign, and wired it to Asi in Cameroon to come up with the cheapest way possible of diverting plastic before it washes to the sea and back on to the beaches.

The resulting 2022 report, titled “Reducing Plastic Litter in African Cities: Cost-Effective Methods and Potential for Recycling Offsets,” was published in cooperation with the University of Yaounde in Cameroon and offered several detailed recommendations.

In a set of follow-up actions, Asi helped establish the nongovernmental organization Environmental Protection and Sanitation Action (Enprosa Action) then conducted the collections pilot project this year.

In the pilot, Enprosa Action staffed a 15-day effort focused on eight different “litter concentrations” in urban water canals around the Cameroonian capital of Yaounde.

The pilot project collections averaged seven members per team, a little more than 4 hours per site and, in total, collected 4.24 tons of plastic via 7,748 labor hours. At Cameroon’s minimum wage, the effort would have cost $2,866, the study’s authors estimate. (Ingenthron says the actual amount collected will rise after data from two cities other than Yaounde are added to the total.)

“We hope to make this effort ongoing, a win-win-win, for the environment, African jobs and the plastic industry,” says Asi, who was helped in publishing the report by intern and translator Meline Marguet of Universite de Tours - IAE in France and by editing work from Ingenthron.

Another Asi associate, Edith Mouafo, says, “To improve the environment it would be important to act on three axes: improve waste collection methods in Africa; raise awareness among populations on the importance of sorting waste at [the] household level; and, finally, promote the development of industries for recycling these materials, their reuse and their energy recovery in other sectors of activity.”

“We were already astounded that a mere $1,500 donation with no strings attached led to such an incredibly detailed report," Ingenthron says of the effort. "Imagine our shock when Dr. Asi's team actually took the next steps the following year and demonstrated the cost effectiveness—by actually collecting the plastic bottles and delivering them to a recycler in three separate cities.”

In a blog post about the Cameroon project and report, Ingenthron adds, “This plastic litter offset in Cameroon makes a lot more sense than the cost of increasing a United States city recycling rate by 1 percent.”

Ingenthron says there is a potential for such plastic collection efforts to be auctioned as offsets. Like carbon trading programs, the credits for the scrap collection can potentially be auctioned to plastics producers, plastic packaging users or plastic scrap exporters. “Even cities whose recycling rates have stalled might choose to fund collections overseas rather than spend millions on diminishing returns to collect more plastic in their curbside programs,” Ingenthron says.

Wilfred Mbah, of Limbe, Cameroon, is a former Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection staff member and is providing peer review for the study. “Dr. Asi may have invented a way to do [divert ocean-bound plastic] less expensively than sending Westerners with nets to fish it out of the ocean," says Mbah, who has accepted a scholarship to Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Ingenthron says he and Asi are aware the job opportunities offsets might create could be viewed as a way to exploit inexpensive labor. Ingenthron says, though, that Cameroon can “employ an army of willing workers to collect and recycle its own litter. If the plastic can be resold for 35 cents per kilogram [about 16 cents per pound] in baled form, the cost of ‘offsetting’ could be even lower.”