Clean-ups or Bins? The answer is obvious.

I made a rather obvious observation a few weeks ago while on a field trip to Naivasha, I had to carry a banana peel for a km or so from where I stayed to the village centre. I lamented to my colleagues that there were no bins in sight when I got to the office. And then it dawned on me that even in Nairobi, there were no bins in public areas outside of CBD, malls and office buildings. We often complain about how dirty Nairobi and our environment in general has become, and often shift the blame to people who litter, and yet, we do not have any structures in place to encourage sound waste management practices. Even matatus have more bins that Nairobi. I once asked a room of at least 120 students of Nairobi University who come from different parts of Kenya whether they have access to bins, and not one hand in the crowd went up.

Kenya has no inadequacy of environment related laws, policies, regulations, government institutions and civil society organizations, and yet, we have been unable to realize our guaranteed right to a clean and healthy environment, and infact continued to degrade our environment. The blame for the poor state of our environment does not fall squarely on any single stakeholder, but on all of us. However, some stakeholders have more responsibility than others. Let's take a dive into these roles and hopefully by the end of this post, you will have a clearer picture of where we went wrong and how to fix it.

• The National Government and its institutions:

The National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) is established under the Environmental Management and Coordination Act (EMCA) No. 8 of 1999, as the principal instrument of government in the implementation of all policies relating to the environment. In 23 years of its existence, we have witnessed irregular approval of environmental impact assessments which have led to degradation of our environment by industries and both small and large scale development projects. We have experienced a laxity in holding polluters to account and little to no provision of public waste management structures, case in point bins. The Ministry for Environment has been quite preoccupied with restoration of our forest cover which together with KFS they have done well, which is great but conservation work cannot be done in isolation.

• County Governments and their institutions:

Upon devolution, waste management came under the mandate of county governments, and Nairobi and most other counties have since gotten worse in terms of waste management. Most, if not all counties have contracted private companies to carry out this mandate at fee to the public. Woe unto you if you cannot afford to pay these private companies, and still not have access to a public bin you can dispose your household waste to, which is 60% organic and therefore de-compostable and therefore have no business going into the general waste bin in the first place. These private companies themselves present a unique set of problems ; the garbage trucks are usually regular lorries which are not fit for purpose and thus leak waste during collection and pollute the air with the odour from the waste. Additionally, the collectors who have been employed more often than not do not have access to proper collection equipment, and have to manually carry bins that are 10-15kgs in weight onto the lorries, with bare hands, and no gloves, masks or overralls.

• Civil Society Organisations, you and I.

CSO's like Team Environment Kenya and Clean up Kenya try their best to conduct clean ups in public places, Nairobi River and other heavily polluted areas. These cleans ups require a lot of coordination, massive resources and man-power , usually university students who volunteer (which is how I started getting interested in waste management), and people from various government institutions who almost always pledge how they will go back to their office and push for change that never came. These CSOs try to push for implementation of existing environmental laws and regulations, however without government good will, this is an impossible task.

As for you and I, the personal responsibility falls on us for how we treat our immediate environment and waste we generate, in our homes and business establishments. Do your lifestyle choices contribute to the problem of waste that we are facing or not? Sustainable living is not a far-fetched dream. Sure, my choice to avoid beverages in plastic bottles (you know who I'm talking about) and occasional clean-ups will not reverse the effects of climate change and years of dysfunctional waste management as a country, but there will be one less plastic in the ocean and landfill, and dear friends, that for me is still impact.

I still attend such clean ups even though they are not sustainable because what we need is appropriate implementation of the National Sustainable Waste Management Act 2022 by all stakeholders, beginning with you and I, all the way to the national level. My take-away from all my activities this year regarding waste management, is that, no amount of clean-ups will keep our country clean if we do not all take personal responsibility in our various capacities towards realization of a clean environment, whether you're a mama mboga, the CS of environment or a physical planner at the county office. We do not have a planet B, we are depleting our finite resources by refusing to take responsibility.

The answer is a combination of both; setting us structures to encourage sustainable waste management and practices, and clean ups because no system is without flaws and challenges. This is a call to action, as you plan for 2023, please keep your waste in mind.

With love and passion, happy and sustainable holidays and 2023!