A ban on plastic carrier bags has come into force in Kenya, which means that anyone found selling, manufacturing or carrying them could face fines of up to $38,000 or prison sentences of up to four years.
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The government says the ban will help protect the environment. But manufacturers of the bags have argued that 80,000 jobs could be lost. A number of other African countries have outlawed plastic carrier bags, including Rwanda, Mauritania and Eritrea.
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Many bags drift into the ocean, strangling turtles, suffocating seabirds and filling the stomachs of dolphins and whales with waste until they die of starvation. “If we continue like this, by 2050, we will have more plastic in the ocean than fish,” said Habib El-Habr, an expert on marine litter.
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Plastic bags, which El-Habr says take between 500 to 1,000 years to break down, also enter the human food chain through fish and other animals. .
Animals often graze on the rubbish and the United Nations’ Environment Programme says huge amounts of polythene bags are pulled out of livestock in Nairobi’s abattoirs – as many as 20 bags per cow – raising fears of plastic contamination in beef
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