NAIVASHA, Kenya (AP) – For someone who fishes for a living, nothing says bad day like spending more than 18 hours on a lake and not bringing anything home.
Recently, it was said that a group of fishermen were lost on Lake Naivasha in Kenya for so long and blamed the water silk that has taken over large parts of it.
“They didn't realize that the hyacinth would later take them in,” said fellow 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 tourists who took it as an ornamental,” said Gordon Ocholla, an environmental scientist at Mount Kenya University. .
Water hyacinth was first seen on Lake Naivasha about 10 years ago. Now it has grown into a large shiny mat that can cover areas of the lake. For fishermen, the invasive plant is a threat to their livelihood.
Usually, the presence of water hyacinth is linked to pollution. It is known to thrive in the presence of pollutants and grow quickly, and is considered the most invasive aquatic plant species in the world, Ocholla said. It can block sunlight and affect air flow, affecting the quality of aquatic life.
This has caused a significant decline in the fish population in Lake Naivasha and other affected areas.
The East African Journal of Environment and Natural Resources estimated in a 2023 study that the invasion of water hyacinth in Kenya's lakes – including Africa's largest lake, Lake Victoria – has led to annual losses between $150 million and $350 million in fishing, transport and Kenya. tourism sectors.
The fishermen at Lake Naivasha know that well.
“Before we would 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 daily earnings have dropped from $210 to $35.
Fishermen say they have tried to deal with the attack on water hyacinth but without much success.
“It grows back faster than we can remove it,” Macharia said.
There are several ways to deal with the plant, including physically removing it, said Ocholla. Another method is to introduce organisms that feed on it. Or chemicals can be sprayed to kill the plant, “but this is not favorable because it would harm other aquatic life.”
Several attempts have been made to convert the plant into a useful substance.
“The government had built a biogas processor near the lake where we were supposed to take the hyacinth, but it never worked,” said Macharia. He didn't know why.
The fishermen, through a Kenyan start-up, recently started using a method that transforms water hyacinth into a biodegradable package.
HyaPak started in 2022 as a project at Egerton University in Kenya. It tries to create environmentally friendly packaging.
“On one hand there is a problem with water hyacinth, and on the other hand there is a 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 created the project after a disastrous field trip that left him and his classmates stranded in Lake Naivasha.
HyaPak has entered into a partnership with the fishermen, who harvest the water hyacinth and dry it in the sun for a negotiable fee. It will then be transported to the Kenya Institute of Industrial Research and Development in Nairobi, where HyaPak is located.
There, it is mixed with what Nguthiru called “proprietary additives” and turned into a biodegradable paper material.
HyaPak targets the agricultural sector, creating biodegradable bags for seedlings. The bags decompose over time, releasing nutrients that Nguthiru said are beneficial to the plants.
HyaPak works with 50 fishermen at Lake Naivasha, including Macharia. The company said it processes up to 150 kilograms of water hyacinth every week, turning it into 4,500 biodegradable packages.
Experts said that it would be a challenge to increase such work.
“Solutions like this and others implemented by similar startups could be promising and really work, but if they can't be scaled to a higher level that matches the aggressiveness of the water hyacinth, the problem will still persist,” Ocholla said.
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