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It rained, and like every year, the streets of Bamako and other major cities in the country were flooded. In some neighborhoods, rivers replaced the streets for hours, waiting for water to flow into blocked drains. Every year, we pretend to want to free them from the garbage that obstructs them. We carry the earth and waste to the edge. We wait for the rain to gradually bring them down, thinking that we have done a useful work. This year, despite the launch of this useless work on July 8 in the Bamako district, we have not yet seen its effectiveness in many communities.
In reality, these ridiculous actions are just a small bandage on the wounds of Mali’s waste management, just like the incoherent, short-sighted and inefficient ad hoc actions. Take, for example, the January 2012 law that banned the production, import and sale of non-biodegradable plastic bags. Almost a decade has passed since the law was passed, and our habits have not changed at all.
Nothing has changed in the management of this waste either: it is not destroyed and is almost never recycled. According to a study carried out by INSTAT in 2021, we live as if we did not generate 3,210 cubic meters of solid waste every day for the city of Bamako. And this figure does not take into account the amount of solid waste that is widely dispersed throughout the city, which irreversibly contaminates the land and water.
The worst part is that, although our capital has more than 5 million inhabitants, we still do not have a waste incineration plant, and perhaps the hundreds of thousands of tons of garbage generated every year would miraculously disappear.
So we can talk about climate change for a long time, but what needs to change first are our environmental and health policies.
Aurélie Dupain
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