Zanzibar, Tanzania

The ruins of Maruhubi Palace are only four kilometres north of Zanzibar Town, just a few steps from the beach. The palace is named after its former owner, an Arab from the Al-Marhuby tribe. The palace was built by Sultan Barghash, the third Arab sultan of Zanzibar, between 1880-1882

The vast majority of the waste is wind-blow and dump plastic which has collected on the beach as flotsam.

The waste is removed by hand collection, sorted by type and then recycled at local depos.

But there’s still time to reverse this trend and, encouragingly, the technology and methodologies to do so already exist. Using first-of-its-kind modeling, Pew and SYSTEMIQ looked at six scenarios to reduce plastics, ranging from worst case—what the report labels “business as usual”—to a best-case “system change” that would demand a significant revamping of plastics design, production, sale, use, disposal, and recycling.

The research found that the system change scenario would reduce the annual flow of plastic waste into the ocean by about 80% by 2040 with action by government and industry leaders driving much of the change.