The palm-fringed Lake Malawi is often marketed as the world’s most diverse fish sanctuary and Malawi’s top tourist destination thanks to its blue waters, golden sands and beckoning calm. However, the dazzling buzzwords obscure a stunning attraction under siege from manmade waste management crisis, especially neglected plastic pollution. From Karonga at the northern tip to Monkey Bay in Mangochi on the southern end, the beckoning beaches are soiled by poorly handled waste.
They include empty beer bottles on the sands and in water; plastics clinging to reeds and rocks and discarded food wrappers floating near places where locals swim and fishers cast their nets. The environmental concern poses a threat to human health and tourism. Even tourists, the freshwater lake’s roaming ambassadors, are concerned.
Phobe Schroder, from Germany, says Scottish missionary explorer David Livingstone’s Lake of Stars no longer resembles the paradise she first visited before the Covid-19 pandemic in 2019. “I am ashamed,” she says. “The beaches are no longer what I told the people I brought here.
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Each step now marks where waves have carved away another layer of sand.” Her compatriot Emmi von Ploetz, fom Berlin, says banned single-use plastics have become Malawi’s “new national flower” as environmental protectors sleep on the job. “It is what you see everywhere, even at the lake and beyond,” she says. Last year, the High Court of Malawi upheld environmental protection regulations that outlaw production, distribution and sales of thin plastics, but they remain on sale nationwide.
Users indiscriminately discard the single-use plastics in open spaces, polluting crop fields, water sources and air at the expense of human life, fish, wildlife, livestock and other living things. Between 2015 and 2018, some volunteers along Lake Malawi collected nearly 500 000 items of human-made litter from a beach stretch covering about 32 hectares. Plastic accounted for about 80 percent of the debris, they reported. Cool Runnings Lake Resort proprietor Samantha Luddick says the waste choking Lake Malawi comes from multiple actors who dump leftovers irresponsibly.
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