When I first arrived in Africa more than 20 years ago, most everything I bought in the grocery store came in a can or a paper bag. Very few items in those days were packaged in plastic.

The great thing about the canned goods was that the can itself was reusable by local people. Tins were washed and smashed or cut and shaped into new, useful items. Small oil-burning lamps were made from these. Boxes that resembled little suitcases were created for storage.

Paper bags were used again, too. In many a smoky hut hot pots were lifted off the fire with the aid of a folded bag in place of a fancy oven mitt. Lists were written on second-hand bags, math problems were scratched down and solved and fires were started all with the assistance of already-used paper bags.

Today,  very few of my groceries here in Tanzania come home in either paper or tin cans. Just about everything comes in some sort of plastic packaging.

This plastic is a big problem.  Nearby any human settlement, plastic has made a poisonous mark on the environment. Shredded plastic bags cling tenaciously to sparse acacias across the once clean plains. Branches along rivers hold the trash that swollen currents have left behind like the remnants of a party the night before. Only no one is coming to clean up after this party.

It’s not just that plastic is unsightly. Plastic is poison. The volume of plastic (bags and otherwise) in the soil today is actually polluting some areas of African earth to the point of decimated fertility levels. And that’s not all. Plastic breaks down into microscopic particles that enter the food chain. Not only is our soil damaged by our over-enthusiastic use of plastics, our very food is becoming contaminated by it.

We have to change.

Reduce. Re-use. Recycle. Reform. This is the mantra and I’m learning to apply it. This helps on a personal level and I hope that the ripple effect will move out beyond our home as well.

But Africa is in desperate need of help in this area.

So here’s my idea: let some of you who want to do something for Africa get yourselves degrees in Environmental Science and launch a wave of experts to help this stunningly beautiful continent take better care of herself.

I would love to see Africa’s lovely face coverd only in dust once again.