World Cleanup Day Won’t Fix Africa’s Plastic Crisis But It Can Point The Way
By Luc ANATO
On September 20, millions of people will put on gloves, pick up bags and walk through streets, beaches, neighbourhoods and waterways to collect waste.
They will do something useful.
But after the last bag is tied, the last photograph is taken and the gloves come off, a more difficult question remains:
What changes next?
That question matters because World Cleanup Day is no longer a small grassroots initiative. In 2025, 25 million people participated across 190 countries and territories. Since December 2023, September 20 has also been officially recognised by the United Nations as World Cleanup Day through Resolution A/RES/78/122.
That global mobilisation deserves recognition.
But mobilisation should not be confused with transformation.
A cleanup can solve a problem. It cannot solve the system that created it.
When a community removes plastic bottles, sachets and packaging from a roadside or drainage channel, the result is immediate and visible.
The place is cleaner.
A blocked drain may be reopened. Waste that could have reached a river may be intercepted. People who had walked past the same rubbish every day may finally stop and ask how it got there in the first place.
Those things matter.
I say this as someone who helps organise cleanup actions myself. I believe in them because I have seen their value on the ground.
But I have also seen their limits.
A cleaned street can become dirty again.
A cleared drainage channel can fill up again.
And if the same products continue to enter the same community, through the same distribution systems, with the same weak collection infrastructure, then we are not solving the problem. We are repeatedly treating its symptoms.
That is why I do not see World Cleanup Day as the solution to the plastic crisis.
I see it as a possible starting point.
The uncomfortable part comes after the cleanup
Plastic pollution is not primarily a problem of people failing to pick things up.
It is also a problem of what we produce, how we package it, how we sell it, how we collect it, how we finance its end-of-life and what happens when there is nowhere for it to go.
West Africa makes the scale difficult to ignore.
According to the World Bank, the 17 coastal countries of the region generated about 6.9 million tonnes of plastic waste in 2018, with Nigeria alone accounting for about 4.7 million tonnes. The World Bank also reported that around 20% of this waste was generated within 30 kilometres of the coast, where a significant share can ultimately reach marine environments.
These numbers are not simply about litter.
They point to a much larger question: what kind of waste management systems are being built around rapidly growing consumption?
Because picking up plastic after it has escaped into the environment is usually harder than preventing it from escaping in the first place.
When companies show up, the question becomes bigger
Corporate participation in cleanup campaigns is important.
Companies have employees, resources, communication channels and influence. When they use those assets to support environmental action, they can help move the issue beyond the environmental sector and into everyday organisational culture.
But corporate participation should not end with one day of action.
The real test is what happens inside the company afterwards.
Does waste get sorted at source?
Are unnecessary single-use materials being reduced?
Are suppliers being challenged?
Are reusable alternatives being considered?
Is waste data actually measured?
Is there a budget for proper collection and recovery?
And perhaps most importantly:
Does the company change what it does when nobody is taking pictures?
That is where an environmental campaign becomes more than an event.
It becomes a practice.
Plastic does not simply disappear
There is another misconception worth challenging.
When plastic is no longer visible, it has not necessarily ceased to exist.
Many plastics can fragment under environmental conditions. For example, research on polyethylene has documented UV-driven weathering and oxidation that can contribute to fragmentation into smaller particles. The behaviour varies considerably according to the polymer and the surrounding environment, so there is no single “plastic degradation” pathway.
That distinction matters.
A bottle collected from a beach and sent into an appropriate recovery stream is one thing.
A bottle left exposed to sunlight, heat, abrasion and water for years is another.
The objective should therefore not simply be to make plastic disappear from sight.
It should be to keep valuable materials in controlled systems for as long as possible through reduction, reuse, collection, recycling and, where appropriate, recovery.
So what actually moves the needle?
Cleanup is one piece of the puzzle.
Prevention is another.
If governments want fewer plastics in streets and waterways, they need functioning collection systems, enforcement, infrastructure and reliable data.
If companies want to claim environmental responsibility, they need to look beyond volunteering hours and examine the materials and packaging entering their operations.
If producers place large volumes of plastic products on the market, responsibility for what happens afterwards cannot simply disappear at the point of sale.
And if recycling is part of the answer, then collection, sorting and markets for recycled materials have to work together.
This is where policies such as extended producer responsibility become important: not because regulation is fashionable, but because someone ultimately has to pay for and organise what happens to products after their useful life.
Without those systems, communities are often left carrying a burden they did not create alone.
From collection to prevention
Perhaps the most useful thing World Cleanup Day can do is make the invisible visible.
A pile of plastic collected from a beach is not just a pile of rubbish.
It is evidence.
Evidence of consumption.
Evidence of weak collection.
Evidence of poor disposal practices.
Evidence of products that were designed without enough thought for what happens after use.
Evidence that a material intended to be useful for minutes can remain in the environment for far longer.
The challenge is what we do with that evidence.
We should count the bags collected, yes.
But we should also ask:
Where did this waste come from?
Which products dominate the collection?
Why did they end up there?
Who is responsible for managing them after use?
What can be changed before next year’s cleanup?
Those questions turn a cleanup from a one-day operation into a source of information.
And information can become policy.
Where this leaves September 20
I will still put on the gloves.
I will still encourage people to participate.
I will still celebrate communities that decide to clean the places they live in.
Because action matters.
But I do not want us to confuse a cleaner street with a solved problem.
A cleanup is an intervention. It is not a complete solution.
The real success of World Cleanup Day should not be measured only by how many bags we collect on September 20.
It should also be measured by how many bags we no longer need to collect the following year.
That means changing the conversation from:
“How much plastic did we remove?”
to:
“Why was that plastic there in the first place?”
Africa’s plastic crisis will not be solved with gloves and garbage bags alone.
But if World Cleanup Day helps us ask harder questions about production, consumption, responsibility, infrastructure and prevention then perhaps the cleanup is doing something more important than simply cleaning.
It is pointing us toward what needs to change.
Luc ANATO is co-founder of VEDI Action, a sustainability and CSR consulting firm based in Benin, and serves as Benin’s National Focal Point for the International Francophone Coalition Zero Plastic.