This archive report was first published on 11 June 2020.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread globally, it has also caused severe disruptions in the supply of personal protective equipment (PPE), particularly in poorer countries with limited resources.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the problem is particularly severe in countries with few resources to pay high prices in a competitive global market.
Uganda is one such country, where medical workers have discussed work boycotts to protest the lack of protective equipment in hospitals, especially after several healthcare workers were confirmed infected with the virus.
Dr. Mukuzi Muhereza, secretary general for the Uganda Medical Association, warned last week that the situation is critical, with many people working without PPE.
“That is hampering the fight against Covid-19 because there’s fear among health workers that anytime I touch a patient I might be a Covid patient myself,” he said.
However, a social enterprise called Takataka Plastics has been manufacturing face shields from recycled plastic waste to help combat the pandemic.
Co-founder Peter Okwoko, 29, said that when the Ugandan government ordered all non-essential workplaces shut in late March, he and his colleague Paige Balcom kept working.
They shifted gear and began manufacturing makeshift plastic face shields from discarded plastic bottles, which they delivered to the local public hospital.
“The doctor from Gulu regional referral hospital requested we make 10 face shield masks urgently because they didn’t have enough” and the hospital had just received its first Covid-19 patient, said Okwoko.
The social enterprise has since manufactured about 1,200 of the recycled plastic face shields, with 500 sold at low cost to NGOs and private health facilities and an additional 700 donated to public hospitals.
Okwoko said that some of the material used in the face shields now comes from hospital waste, such as used intravenous drip bottles.
He noted that the group is manufacturing both single-use shields that cost about one dollar (3,000 Ugandan shillings), with frames made of cheap foam, or reusable ones, with plastic frames, that cost about $2.70 (10,000 shillings).
“Our focus at the moment is to fight Covid-19,” said Balcom, a mechanical engineer who met Okwoko in 2019 while doing research on plastic pollution in Uganda.
She added that the effort is also helping battle plastic pollution and dirty air, as burning of plastic waste is common in Uganda.
At least 80 percent of plastic waste isn’t collected in the northern town of Gulu, where Takataka operates, and piles of it end up in waterways, on roadsides and on vacant land.
Takataka now hopes to expand its operations into a full-scale plastic processing plant capable of recycling 9 tonnes of plastic waste monthly, up from about 60kg of plastic a day currently.
