In Conakry, the small sachet of cool water is part of daily life. People buy it on the street corner, tear it open with their teeth and drain it in a few gulps. Since 21 September, however, it had vanished from the stalls. That day, the two-year grace period set by the decree banning single-use plastics came to an end, and producers stopped filling their sachets.
The gap opened up at unexpected speed. At a press conference on 6 October, Mohamed Kourouma, chief executive of the company Hamana, explained that sachets met the needs of about 85% of the population, compared with 15% for bottles. All of that demand shifted at once onto a product whose production was not sized to keep up. According to him, a factory cannot multiply its output overnight without the machines, raw materials and distribution channels to match.
Households paid the price. A 1.5-litre bottle, usually sold for around 5,000 Guinean francs, was going for between 6,000 and 7,000 francs depending on the neighbourhood, Africaguinée reports. One customer met in a restaurant in Cosa said he was eating without drinking to keep his spending down. Amadou Thiam summed up the general feeling: not everyone can pay that much every time they are thirsty. Other residents called for more subsidised public standpipes and for tap water from the public network to flow regularly again. The Ministry of Commerce had asked sellers to keep their old prices, without managing to stop the increase.
The government eventually responded. On the evening of 7 October, on national television, its spokesperson Faya François Bourouno announced that General Mamadi Doumbouya, acting on an appeal from producers, was granting a six-month moratorium on the manufacture of sachets for mineral and mineralised water. The transitional president cited the wellbeing of the population and the need to keep their access to drinking water uninterrupted.
The exception is narrow. It applies exclusively to water sachets, the spokesperson stressed, with the ban remaining fully in force for other disposable plastic items. In return, the state is promising tax and customs incentives to encourage the production and import of biodegradable packaging, PET resin and preforms used to make bottles. Manufacturers are urged to use the reprieve to organise the collection and processing of their waste. An interministerial commission chaired by the Prime Minister will oversee follow-up.
The case illustrates the dilemma facing many African countries in the fight against plastic pollution. Discarded sachets clog drains and make flooding worse, yet for many people they remain the only affordable drinking water, especially where the public network works poorly. In six months, Guinea will need a credible alternative in place, or it risks living through the same crisis again.