The Tanzanian government has announced that plans are underway to introduce new regulations which will limit the use of plastic bottles that are not easily recycled and constitute threats to the environment. When implemented, the regulations will require that soft drink manufacturing companies use a clear polyethene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottle for packaging.
This is expected to take the place of the usual-coloured bottles whose recyclability is said not to be critical to improving the environment. Plastic pollution remains one of the most pressing environmental issues, as the rapidly increasing production of disposable plastic products overwhelms the world’s ability to deal with them.
In 2016 alone, approximately 400 billion water bottles around the globe were consumed, equivalent to 1 million plastic water bottles per minute or 20,000 bottles per second. Researchers estimate that more than 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic have been produced since the early 1950s. Only 9% of all plastics get recycled, while the remaining 91% end up in landfills or leaches into the oceans and each year, eight million tons of plastic gets dumped into the oceans, the equivalent of filling five grocery bags worth of plastic waste for each of coastline around the world.
Millions of animals are said to be killed by plastics every year, from birds to fish to other marine organisms and nearly 700 species, including endangered ones, are known to have been affected by plastics. Speaking in Dar es Salaam- the country’s largest city and business capital on Saturday, the minister of State in the Vice President Office responsible for Union and Environment, Mr Selemani Jafo, said the regulations will be ready before the end of the year. Jafo, who spoke at an event organized by Coca Cola to unveil the new look of its Sprite, packaged in the new plastic bottle, said the regulations will be painful to soft drink makers who use coloured bottle packaging.
“The aim of the government is to phase out unfriendly packaging,” Jafo said. “The regulations will be gazetted before the end of the year, ready for use and so, I urge investors to follow what Coca Cola has done”. Also speaking during the occasion, the National Environmental Management Council (NEMC) director-general, Dr Samuel Gwamaka, said NEMC had already written to some investors to inform them about the plan and the need for them to act responsibly when it comes to environmental protection. On his part, Coca-Cola Kwanza managing director, Unguu Sulay said that the shift from the green bottle to the transparent one is a clear demonstration of Coca-Cola’s commitment to environmental protection, using eco-friendly innovations.
He noted that the move is part of the company’s ‘world without waste’ vision which targets to collect and recycle every bottle that the company produces by 2030. “A new shift from iconic green bottles means more Sprite bottles can be collected, recycled and reused to make new ones,” he said. “Tanzania is the fifth market in Africa where Coca-Cola has introduced the Sprite clear PET, after South Africa, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Kenya”.
