Boiling Point: What can we learn from Africa’s Likoma Island?
I’m John Corrigan, Environment, Health and Science Deputy Editor for the L.A. Times; I’m filling in for Sammy Roth today.
LIKOMA ISLAND, Malawi — Pricilla Chirwa and Pilirani Mwase sit on a mat, backs against a concrete step, stringing copper wire around small wafers of green, white and amber glass that will be draped from chandeliers and other hanging decorations.
The glass pieces were made by churning broken beer and wine bottles through a makeshift tumbling machine rigged out of salvaged sewer pipe, water pump motors and bicycle parts. After a few days in the tumbler, the pieces emerge looking like the smooth, polished sea glass that washes up on the seashore.
The chandeliers and other decorative items crafted at the bustling Katundu workshop here are a testament not only to the artisanship of the workers and designers, but to an ethic of letting nothing of value go to waste.
It’s an ethic those of us living in advanced economies, with far more resources than the people of Likoma Island, might do well to emulate.
Barely one-fifth of what can be recycled from U.S. homes is actually being recycled, and just 43% of households participate in recycling programs, according to the 2024 residential report from the Recycling Partnership.
California beats the national average with a participation rate of 65%, but that’s not much to brag about given the widespread access to curbside recycling programs here. (Hawaii tops the nation with a 72% recycling participation rate, while West Virginia pulls up the rear at 41%.)
“We could be doing a lot more,†said Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste. At the same time, he says it would be even better to reuse or repurpose more of our discarded waste, as opposed to seeing it as a raw material to make something new.
Decades ago, most American soft drink bottles were returned for a deposit, washed and refilled for resale a dozen times or more, he noted. Environmentally, that’s a better model than using the returned bottles to make new ones because it requires fewer resources. And, no surprise, that is still the norm in less affluent places around the world.
“When you are of limited means, you are more apt to properly value materials and maximize the value of those materials by repurposing them into other things,†Murray said.
Likoma Island, population 9,000, is such a place. Located on Lake Malawi, the world’s fourth-largest lake by volume (it’s nearly a half-mile deep in spots), it has an economy rooted in fishing and subsistence farming. Villagers get around on foot and wash their clothes in the lake.
The difficult circumstances can be seen on a visit to the island’s Nkhwazi primary school, where head teacher Danford Tauzi points to a chart he keeps on his office wall. One lists the names of students who have dropped out and why. For boys, it’s typically to start work fishing the lake. For girls, there are other reasons. Shyness. Pregnancy. Prostitution.
“There are a lot of challenges,†Tauzi said. “A lot of challenges.â€
Another chart on Tauzi’s wall lists the children who are orphans, who make up nearly 20% of the student population. That’s largely the grim toll of the HIV disease that afflicts 8.4% of Malawi’s female population ages 15 to 49, and 6.7% of that age group overall, according to UNAIDS figures.
Some of the “orphans†are in fact from single-mother homes, but the practical impact is essentially the same because of scant work opportunities for women.
“It happens to be one of the poorest places on the Earth,†a U.S. State Department official said of Malawi. “In rural settings, there are so few opportunities. And whatever those opportunities are, there are even fewer for women.â€
The need to create jobs for women in particular was one of the reasons Suzie Lightfoot launched the Katundu workshop. That and the colossal number of wine, beer and soda bottles that were being generated by Kaya Mawa, the lakeside tourist resort where she and her husband, James, lived and worked from 2005 to 2018.
“I was really horrified by all these bottles,†she said. “This is a tiny island. You can’t fill it up with all these bottles!â€
Katundu’s reliance on recycled and locally sourced materials grew out of work the couple was doing at Kaya Mawa. Hired initially to run the lodge, James Lightfoot later acquired an ownership stake (which he has since sold) and set about making the place self-sustaining and refurbishing it, with the interiors fitted out by Suzie and designer Abi James.
The Lightfoots soon learned that importing finished goods to the island would be costly and time-consuming. So they used old fishing boats to make headboards, crafted rugs and laundry baskets from leaves and fashioned curtain ties with string made from corn husks.
As Suzie Lightfoot worked with villagers to make items for the lodge, she saw the opportunity to create a permanent workshop where the local people could make decorative goods for other hotels in Africa, as well as for sale to tourists visiting the island and a global market online. In addition to recycled glass, other goods for sale are made of old machine parts, clay beads and even seeds. The women also sew tote bags, skirts and other cloth items.
Although a few men work at Katundu, the focus was on hiring women — especially single mothers and women who care for orphans.
“I really wanted to help people who were vulnerable and didn’t have the opportunities for getting employment,†Suzie Lightfoot said. “Their job opportunities on the island are pretty much zero, and they really have no chance.â€
Although the Lightfoots left Likoma Island six years ago, they continue to oversee Katundu from afar and use the workshop to source decorative items for other hotels and lodges in Africa, including for the Latitude Hotels Group chain that James co-founded. Through their company Drift Designs, the Lightfoots have shepherded Katundu products into other commercial and residential properties in Zanzibar, Mauritius, South Africa, Zambia, Uganda, the United Kingdom and France.
Katundu, which roughly translates to “belongings†or “goods†in the local Chichewa language, will eventually be handed over to the villagers to run as the couple’s “thank-you to the island,†James Lightfoot said.
The sustainability ethic that the Lightfoots embedded at Kaya Mawa is hardly unique in Africa, where lodges in remote game parks are often powered entirely by solar, and plastic bottles are shunned. Here and elsewhere, guests are handed metal bottles on arrival, to use and refill from glass carafes of water in their mini fridges or from large canisters in the common areas.
And little if anything goes to waste.
“We live in a consumer society in the West,†James Lightfoot noted. “But in Africa, you don’t. You live in a society where you make things out of other things.
“Nothing is rubbish, really.â€
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