Keeping Sea Life Alive – Plastic Out, Animals In!

I’ve been very lucky to travel to some incredible places for work over the last 25 years. And people always ask me, “What was Sierra Leone like?” or “What did you do in Senegal?” or “What did you think of the Philippines?” The answer usually disappoints people. I wish I could say that I went snorkeling to see coral reefs in the morning, spent my afternoons shopping in the local markets, and ate dinner overlooking pristine oceans. But the actual experience is more like fighting jet lag after a 22-hour trip from my home to a sterile hotel where I force myself to sleep so I can wake up the next morning and take public transportation to a convention center or another hotel. Then we put on a training and meet with local government representatives over dinner in the evening. Or we stay late into the night where countries argue until 3 AM whether we should use “and” instead of “or” in a treaty designed to protect a species or a habitat.

I have seen so many colleagues wearing the same wrinkled clothes for the third day in a row because their luggage got lost by an airline, so many negotiators trying to get an hour of sleep in a side room out of sheer exhaustion, so many fierce advocates for conservation stepping outside a crowded meeting to make a short video call to their young children on Thanksgiving because they can’t be there in person. All of us working to use our experience and skills to protect wildlife and ecosystems that are under enormous threat from powerful interests. When you get the smallest concession, it’s thrilling, but it’s devastating when you watch those powerful interests sneak in an advantage elsewhere.

So, I’ve been to a lot of incredible places, and I’m so thankful for the people I met in each of them, but my memories of Bangkok and Doha and Samarkand and Lima and all the rest are all kind of the same. Hotel to shuttle bus to conference center to shuttle bus to hotel, always jet-lagged, over and over again.

But there’s a hotel in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, that’s a little different. It’s right on the ocean. It’s not expensive, and it has a conference room that has been perfect for so many of the trainings that Born Free USA has done in the region. It’s not fancy, but it’s also not sterile like so many of the others. It has a view of the ocean, which is incredible, but it also has a view of the beach. And the beach is different than what you might be imagining. It’s not a vacation beach where people lay in the sun. It’s a beach where daily life happens. Dinners, birthday parties, drinks with friends, soccer games, fishing, people streaming on and off the beach from the city, which runs right up to it. It’s a place for social life and for small businesses, for letting the kids run around and for selling fish. It’s the center of daily life for so many people.

Plastic Waste Poisons Our Waters and Kills Animals

A billion people around the world rely on the ocean for their livelihoods, for significant amounts of their food, and for a place to gather in community. The oceans are responsible for our weather, for oxygenating our air, and for capturing so much of the carbon we continue to put into the atmosphere. But the oceans are being overwhelmed. By overfishing, by the heat they’re absorbing, and by the staggering amount of waste we’re dumping in the ocean. Plastic waste, especially, has become an enormous problem.

The scale is hard to fully grasp. We now produce more than 400 million tons of plastic every year, and nearly half of it is designed to be used once and thrown away. Despite decades of conversation about recycling, only about 9 percent of all plastic waste ever created has actually been recycled.

Each year, somewhere between 8 and 11 million tons of that waste finds its way into the ocean. It doesn’t arrive all at once dramatically. It just trickles in, a constant flow through storm drains, through rivers, through the daily habits of communities that often have no other options for managing waste. In fact, around 1,000 rivers are responsible for carrying nearly 80 percent of that plastic into the ocean, turning inland challenges into global ones.

The plastic that is already there doesn’t just go away. It breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces called microplastics. There are now tens of millions of tons of plastic in the ocean, accounting for the vast majority of marine debris. It suffocates sea turtles. It’s in the stomachs of seabirds, in the bodies of fish, and increasingly, in us. Microplastics have been found in our water, our blood, even our lungs.

More than 700 marine species are affected by these plastics. Hundreds of thousands of marine mammals die each year from them. Entire ecosystems are being reshaped by something we created for convenience and then failed to manage. And that beach in Dakar where people shout out to their friends, grill fish together, meet and fall in love, play sports together, and raise their kids is being reshaped, too, when the ocean becomes unhealthy, as plastics and pollution slowly poison it.

Born Free USA Launches Two Projects in West Africa to Combat Plastic Pollution

But the story doesn’t have to end there. If the problem feels overwhelming at a global scale, the response doesn’t have to be. We can respond in very specific places, with very practical steps, led by the people who are closest to the effects of plastic pollution.

Cleaning Up the Coast in Ghana

Born Free USA is proud to announce two projects to respond to the ocean plastics crisis. In Ghana, that work begins along the coast in Shama, where mangroves, estuaries, and nearshore waters provide critical habitat for species that are already under immense pressure. Species like sea turtles, crocodiles, and migratory birds that have survived for millions of years there are now navigating coastlines increasingly shaped by plastic. The approach there is not just to clean beaches, although that matters. It’s to understand how plastic moves through the community, where it enters the ecosystem, and how to stop it before it gets there. That means working with fishermen, with market sellers, with women’s groups and youth organizations to test alternatives to single-use plastics, to recover abandoned fishing gear, and to build something more durable than a one-time intervention. It also means creating local stewardship where trained community members monitor ecosystems, track where the risks are coming from, and make sure that this doesn’t end when our project does.

Protecting Nigeria’s Waterways

In Nigeria, the focus shifts inland, but the story is the same. In Nasarawa State, plastic waste moves from markets into drainage systems, into rivers, and eventually into some of the country’s most important ecosystems. Here, our intervention starts at the source. In the markets where plastic is used every day, we’ll reduce the dependence on plastics by introducing reusable alternatives, supporting women to produce and sell those alternatives, and creating incentives for change that make sense economically, not just environmentally. At the same time, we will organize clean-up efforts where plastic has already accumulated, and we will conduct education campaigns that connect what people see in their immediate environment to broader impacts on wildlife, water quality, and health.

Born Free USA Is Working Toward Tangible Outcomes

These projects only work if they work for the people who live there. Alternatives must be affordable and livelihoods must be strengthened, not undermined. Communities need to have a reason to care and the tools to act.

We’re working toward tangible outcomes like less plastic entering rivers and oceans, healthier habitats, and fewer animals harmed. But we’re also working toward a long-term, holistic outcome that results in stronger local systems, better information sharing, and communities that are not just participating in conservation, but leading it.

Ultimately, the goal isn’t just to remove plastic from a beach in Dakar or a river in Nigeria. It’s to change the conditions that allowed it to get there in the first place—and to make sure that, over time, less and less of it does.

Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Alice