Following on from my Community gets involved in cleaning up Newlands Shopping Centre blog, I was pleasantly surprised to note that the following Friday morning of the 24th September 2010, the City of Harare was themselves painting the zebra crossings with a fresh coat of paint within the shopping area. I have no doubt that the communities work the previous week had got their attention and they felt they had to go out there and continue the good work that the surrounding businesses had already started. We now have a very fresh, clean looking shopping area in Newlands. Unfortunately this is not the case around the rest of the country and I am saddened every time I pass vacant areas of land and see copious amounts of plastic litter dumped right on the road. We need to do something about this continuing waste problem and get everyone to do their bit for their earth!

I recently found some interesting facts on the I Save Earth web site:

As we become more technologically advanced, we produce materials that can withstand extreme temperatures, are durable and easy to use. Plastic bags, synthetics, plastic bottles, tin cans, and computer hardware- these are some of the things that make life easy for us. But what we forget is that these advanced products do not break down naturally. Plastic bags are difficult and costly to recycle and most end up on landfill sites where they take around 300 years to photo degrade. They break down into tiny toxic particles that contaminate the soil and waterways and enter the food chain when animals accidentally ingest them. But the problems surrounding waste plastic bags starts long before they photo degrade.

When we dispose them in a garbage pile, the air, moisture, climate, or soil cannot break them down naturally to be dissolved with the surrounding land. Our planet is becoming increasingly contaminated by our unnecessary use of plastic carrying bags. Big black bin liners, plastic carrier bags carrying advertising logos, clear sandwich bags, vegetable bags and a variety of other forms used to carry our daily food items and other items are all polluting our environment. Just take a look around you. Plastic bags can be seen hanging from the branches of trees, flying in the air on windy days, settled amongst bushes and floating on rivers. They clog up gutters and drains causing water and sewage to overflow and become the breeding grounds of germs and bacteria that cause diseases.

We produce 6 billion tons of plastic a year. We use it for everything it seems. One reason why plastic was invented was to reduce ivory use. Plastic recycling is difficult, and not profitable, leading to only 3-5% of the plastic produced to be recycled.

Closer to home, social activist Peta Searle shared this information with Zimbabweans recently:

Over the years plastic has become the “clean, safe” and accepted method of packaging and carrying goods. The problem is that plastics are non-biodegradable. When they are carelessly thrown away, they collect around the city, choking drains, threatening small animals, damaging the soil and polluting our beautiful country. A study in Ghana showed that plastic wastes have virtually choked the drainage system in the urban centre’s of the country to such an extent that it takes only the slightest of rainfall to precipitate floods in major cities.

Plastic poisons and pollutes

Plastic is made from oil and coal, materials that are both unsustainable and non-renewable. Mining, transport, energy production and petrochemical processes all damage the environment. In this way, plastic production contributes to problems such as oil spills, toxic emissions, and global warming through the release of greenhouse gases. If you decide to burn plastic to try to get rid of it, there are also problems. Dioxins (any of several toxic hydrocarbons that occur as impurities in petroleum-derived herbicides, disinfectants, and other products) and furans (a colourless flammable toxic liquid heterocyclic compound, used in the manufacture of cotton textiles and in the synthesis of nylon) are two highly toxic chemicals created unintentionally during plastic incineration.

Plastic wastes choke seas across the globe. This form of pollution is one of the biggest environmental problems we face, and it’s only getting worse as plastic production continues to grow.

What can we do about the plastic problem?

Reduce, re-use, and recycle!

Plastic bags are everywhere and they don’t disappear when we throw them away and where is away. God gave us an earth to line on and every little speck of it is our responsibility, so I ask you again, when you throw it away where is away? Away is out of sight, out of mind, but global warming is all of our responsibility and it is time you played your part. So make the effort, only good can come of it. Reduce, reduce, reduce the use of plastic bags. Have a box in your car and load the groceries from the trolley into the boot. Carry a green bag to load up the groceries. Don’t put all the vegetables in to plastic when you have it weighed, bring your own big bag and weigh the vegetables separately and put them all in one packet. The more people who bring their own re-useable non-plastic bags to the shops, the less plastic bags are needed. If you already have plastic bags, you could re-use them several times yourself. Thick plastic bags are easier to re-use, and they are also easier and more profitable to recycle.

Campaign!

Campaigns to change the law about plastic bags have been very effective in many African countries. Botswana launched a plastics petition campaign, asking that shops only stock plastic bags thicker than 60 micron. Stronger, thicker plastic bags are re-useable and easier to recycle than thin bags. Shoppers should pay for the stronger bags, so that they would be more likely to re-use them than throw them away and manufacturers should make sure that plastic bags are made of materials that can be recycle more easily. The result is that several large shop chains now sell thicker re-useable plastic carrier bays.

The Eritrean government has also taken a firm line on plastic bags. Since January 2005, those who import, produce, distribute or sell plastic bags are fined, and Kenya may soon follow suite.

If you have to dispose of your plastic, throw it in a hole and bury it don’t burn it. Dioxin a gas released from the burning of plastic is highly carcinogenic and will affect an unborn baby. Appeal to your councilors to dig a deep hole in your neighbourhood where plastic can be disposed of and most importantly reduce and reuse.

Meanwhile we need to lobby to our governments to take strong action against toxic plastic products. I encourage anyone in local groups or organisations involved in this issue to join the expanding coalition – making strong connections in Zimbabwe is the next step. So get involved! It is our world that we have to keep clean and beautiful for ourselves, our children, our grandchildren and generations to follow.

Let’s make Zimbabwe beautiful.

Some of the feedback we’ve received from members of the Kubatana community:

I’m very much worried about the so called ZESA load shedding especially in the area I live, Hatfield. Usually the cutoff is at 5.30pm and will be back at around 10pm and will also be off as early as 4.30am. We hardly use electricity. To my surprise the bills are just too much as we hardly use electricity. One wonders why such load shedding is like that in this area which is along the airport road. This road is usually used by government officials, diplomats, tourists, and investors. How can we have tourists and investors to this country when they are driving in the dark from the airport? This will obviously turn most of our potential investors and tourists away. Their first sight to the country of hope is just darkness and they will feel they will be throwing their money in the dark. My suggestion to this load shedding is that, cut offs should be done during the day, lets say from 9am to 4pm. Lets market our country for potential investors in light. I feel ZESA authorities should look into this matter with broad minds which are full of sales and marketing ideas. Lets market Zimbabwe to rebuild our economy.

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I am getting very agitated with the way Ruwa Local Board is managing the service delivery in the otherwise very quiet and potentially well managed surburb. For starters the board has simply resigned on the water provision aspect, they sit back and relax while the residents go for months on end without water. Awhile ago they used to provide water from a couple of boreholes located on the USAID side but those days are way behind us. Residents resorted to sink wells in their yards but due to the poor rainfall last season the watertable is now miserably low and all you get from the well is mud . . . is this not precipitating a cholera outbreak!!!! To add insult the board has the audacity to dispatch water meter readers for the drops that drip out of the taps once in a blue moon. The drips are so brown from the rusted pipes that you do not even dare use them for flushing the toilet because you will stain it forever. The refuse collection side is even more disappointing. They have a known schedule that the residents know and early in the morning on the particular day all households bring out the refuse outside their yards to be picked up . . . this is a mirage, the refuse is never collected for weeks on end. I just wish the Board could use their municipal police to announce in advance that they will not be picking up the refuse anytime soon and it stays hidden in the yards. I am so fed up of officials who sit in the office and do nothing except grow big tummies from the rates that we fork out every month.

The banning of SMS messaging in Mozambique is but one of several signs that both SMS (short message service) and the internet are changing the way media creates a national conversation in African countries, writes Russell Southwood on Pambazuka.

Read this very interesting article on the use of new media here but take note that Kubatana did not provide the MDC with an interactive voice response system for its phone in information service.

“Enemy Number One,” featured a panel comprised of Zimbabwean writer Christopher Mlalaz and USC English professor Michelle Gordon and Wolf Gruner, a USC professor of history who holds the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies. Speaking of his experiences with media censorship under the government of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, Mlalazi’s experience was skillfully included within the context of Feuchtwanger’s 1940 internment and escape from Nazi-occupied France.

Mlalazi, the recipient of the 2010 Villa Aurora Feuchtwanger Fellowship, gave the audience frightening accounts of Mugabe’s censorship tactics — including a description of the torture that the production manager of his satirical play, The Crocodile of Zambezi, endured after the show’s second night.

Mlalazi himself has received ominous phone calls since announcing his excitement for winning the Feuchtwanger Fellowship on Facebook. Just like Feuchwanger, Mlalazi lives in a constant state of fear.

Fear, however, is a double-edged sword: Although it paralyzes, it also motivates. Despite some apprehension, Mlalazi will return to Zimbabwe in December so that he can be with his friends and family — and to continue helping his people answer questions about themselves and their country.

Mlalazi is careful, however, to mask his social and political critique behind a veil of abstraction and metaphor.

“We will never be silenced,” he said.

More here

From LegalBrief:

Former Constitutional Court Judge Richard Goldstone says that levelling war crimes charges against Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe would not be possible.

According to a report on the iAfrica.com site, Goldstone said while there were serious reports about crimes against minority groups in Zimbabwe during Mugabe’s reign in the late 1980s and most of the 1990s, they fell outside the ambit of the International Crimes Court. ‘Firstly, the court has no jurisdiction on anything that happened prior to 1 July 2002. Secondly, Zimbabwe is not a member of the court and therefore the court has no jurisdiction over any war crimes committed in Zimbabwe,’ said Goldstone.

Full report on the iAfrica.com site