LUZIRA, Uganda (AP) – Flowering plants magically rise from Lake Victoria onto a wooden boat, lending it a verdant ambience that enchants many visitors.
The initial appeal becomes even more compelling when tourists in Uganda learn that the green comes from an innovative recycling project that uses thousands of dirt-encrusted plastic bottles to anchor the boat.
Former tour guide James Kateeba began building the boat in 2017 in response to the tons of plastic waste he saw in the lake after heavy rains. He realized the ship could serve as an example of a sustainable business on the shores of Lake Victoria: a floating restaurant and bar that you could detach and float for pleasure.
Many who come here to relax in Luzira, a lakeside suburb of Uganda’s capital Kampala, know nothing of the boat’s history. Kateeba insists it is primarily “a conservation effort”, one man’s attempt to protect one of Africa’s great lakes from decay.
Lake Victoria is the second largest freshwater lake in the world and stretches across three countries. Still, it is plagued by runoff and other pollution, sand mining and a drop in water levels, partly due to climate change.
In the rainy season, layers of plastic debris float near some beaches, a visible sign of pollution worrying fishing communities heavily dependent on the lake.
“The fact that as a country we had a pollution problem…I decided to design something extraordinary,” Kateeba said, looking at the lake horizon, which was colored with a green substance that indicates pollutants from a nearby brewery.
He began asking fishermen from nearby landing sites to collect plastic bottles for a small fee. Within six months he received more than 10 tons of bottles. Charges were tied in fishing nets and smeared with firm dirt, providing the firm foundations on which the boat is moored and which are also fertile ground for tropical plants to climb.
Today, the boat, marketed as a floating island, can comfortably serve 100 visitors at a time, Kateeba said.
“This is Morning Glory,” he said proudly, stroking a brightly flowering vine one final afternoon as he prepared to cast off the boat for the pleasure of his customers. Elsewhere on the boat, a group of TikToking teenagers were dancing. Above, a carpenter built a new wooden sun deck.
Jaro Matusiewicz, a visiting businessman from Greece, said he had “never seen a place like this,” and praised the boat’s “accommodating” vibe as he immersed himself in fish and chips.
“That’s a very good idea,” he said. “When he collects and uses the bottles, that’s fantastic! … Not only do they clean up the environment, but they offer something unique, very unique.”
A similar project was launched on the beaches of Kenya in 2018, where a small boat called the Flipflopi was built entirely from recycled plastic that once littered sandy beaches and towns along the Indian Ocean.
In 2021, the flip-flops undertook a voyage on Lake Victoria “to raise awareness of the pollution plaguing the region’s most critical freshwater ecosystem,” according to the United Nations Environment Programme.
Kateeba said he hopes his boat is exemplary.
“I’m sure that with some experience we get from that, we should be able to encourage other people to design things,” he said. “Other methods, not necessarily this kind … to try to deal with the plastic pollution at Lake Victoria.”
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