NAIVASHA, Kenya (AP) – For a fisherman for a living, nothing says a bad day like spending more than 18 hours on the lake and not coming home with anything.
Recently, a group of fishermen were said to have been stranded in Kenya’s famous Lake Naivasha for such a long time that they blamed the water hyacinth that took up most of it.
“They didn’t see that the hyacinth would catch them later,” said another fisherman, Simon Macharia. The men even lost their nets, he said.
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The water hyacinth is native to South America and was reportedly introduced to Kenya in the 1980s by “visitors who brought it as an ornamental plant,” said Gordon Ocholla, an environmental scientist at Mount Kenya University.
The water hyacinth first appeared in Lake Naivasha about 10 years ago. Now it has become a large, shiny carpet that can cover the pool area. For fishermen, this invasive plant is a health hazard.
Generally, the presence of water hyacinth is associated with pollution. It is known to thrive in polluted and fast-growing areas, and is considered one of the most invasive aquatic plant species in the world, Ocholla said. It can block sunlight and affect air circulation, affecting the quality of aquatic life.
This has caused a significant decline in the number of fish in Lake Naivasha and other affected areas.
The East African Journal of Environment and Natural Resources estimates in a 2023 study that water hyacinth infestations in Kenya’s lakes – including Africa’s largest lake, Lake Victoria – lead to annual losses of between $150 million and $350 million in fishing, transport and fisheries in Kenya. tourism sectors.
Fishermen in Lake Naivasha know that well.
“Earlier we used to catch up to 90 kilograms (198 pounds) of fish per day, but today we get between 10 kilograms and 15 kilograms,” said Macharia.
This means that the daily income has dropped from $210 to $35.
Fishermen said they tried to fight the water hyacinth attack but with little success.
“It’s growing faster than we can remove it,” Macharia said.
There are several ways to deal with the plant, including physically removing it, Ocholla said. Another way is to introduce organisms that eat it. Although chemicals can be sprayed to kill this plant, “but this is not good because it can harm other aquatic animals.”
Several attempts have been made to convert this plant into a useful commodity.
“The government built a gas mill near the lake where we were supposed to get the hyacinth, but it never worked,” said Macharia. He didn’t know why.
Recently fishermen, starting in Kenya, have started using a method that turns the water hyacinth into a biodegradable bag.
HyaPak started in 2022 as a project at Egerton University in Kenya. It wants to make packaging that is environmentally friendly.
“On the one hand, there is the problem of water hyacinth, and on the other, the problem of plastic waste pollution. What we are trying to do is use one problem, the hyacinth, to solve plastic waste pollution,” said HyaPak founder Joseph Nguthiru.
He said he founded the project following a bad trip that left him and his classmates still stunned at Lake Naivasha.
HyaPak has entered into a partnership with fishermen, who harvest the water hyacinth and dry it in the sun for a negotiable fee. It is then moved to the Kenya Industrial Research and Development Institute in Nairobi, where HyaPak is located.
There, it is mixed with what Nguthiru calls “proprietary additives” and turned into biodegradable paper.
HyaPak targets the agricultural sector, creating biodegradable bags for seedlings. The bags rot over time, releasing nutrients that Nguthiru said help the plants.
HyaPak works with 50 fishermen in Lake Naivasha, including Macharia. The company said it processes 150 kilograms of water hyacinth per week, turning them into 4,500 biodegradable packages.
Experts say scaling up such a project will be challenging.
“Those solutions and others that have been used by similar startups may be promising and really work, but if they are not measured at the high level associated with the water hyacinth attack, then the problem will continue,” said Ocholla. .
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