Kigali, RWANDA – When your plane lands at the airport in Kigali, Rwanda, feet swollen, jet lag settling in and dry eyes, it takes you a minute to make sure you heard the flight attendant correctly: “Before you deplane, remove any belongings you have in plastic bags and leave them behind. It is illegal to bring plastic bags into Rwanda.”
Indeed, that is correct. At the airport, a large sign says “the use of non-biodegradable polythene bags is prohibited.” Word is that airport officials will actually confiscate your plastic bags if you even try sneak them in. Given the dozens of machine-gun-armed guards everywhere in the airport, I didn’t feel like testing the country’s commitment to the rule.
The ban covers the entire country – all 10,000 square miles of it. It was the first country in the world to do so. In 1994, Rwanda suffered what some say is the most organized genocidal mass slaughter in 20th century, during which (according to Human Rights Watch) more than 500,000 people were killed in a period of about 100 days. Just more than a decade later, Rwanda, suffering from the billions of plastic bags that were choking waterways and harming ecosystems, stepped up and said “no more.” It was a radical campaign that few other countries had tried. Not even neighboring African countries that are suffering the same problems have followed suit.
Learning about Rwanda’s actions quickly reminded me about Durango’s ongoing plastic bag battle. In Durango, the idea isn’t to ban plastic bags. Instead, the city council recently voted to charge consumers 10 cents per plastic bag that they use at four grocery stores. The action has incited strong emotion, a lot of letters to the editor and a push back by a group that garnered enough signatures to force the issue to be on the November ballot. The reasons for the opposition are myriad. But I wonder if, like in Rwanda, plastic bags were piled dozens high and feet thick in the river, choking to death many species of fish, causing flooding on farms and backing up sewer systems so that when you flushed your toilet everything came right back at you, a fee (or outright ban) would drive home the points that its supporters have been making.
At the Kigali airport, I asked a Rwandan how the ban was working. By now, he said, most have accepted it, even if it has created an underground network of smugglers. At times, business owners might grumble about it because plastic bags are cheaper than paper bags, but in the end, most Rwandans, he said, embrace it because of the economic implications on development in the country. I explained to him Durango’s current plastic bag war, albeit feeling silly that we’re fighting over a seemingly small issue (when compared to, say, an ethnic war). He chuckled and said: “If it is going to be successful, it is going to be challenging.”
