Gloria Majiga-Kamoto, who just won a Goldman Prize – the ‘Green Nobel’,  didn’t set out to lead an environmental revolution in Malawi. She doesn’t even like being called an environmentalist. She just wanted to make sure that the goats being raised by her sustainable agriculture project wouldn’t die from eating the plastic that blew into their fields. So she realized she had to go beyond agricultural advocacy.

While Malawi had enacted a ban on single use plastics in 2015, it wasn’t being enforced because the plastic producing companies had tied it up in court, claiming the ban violated their economic rights. When Majiga-Kamoto first began paying attention to the problem in 2016, they were churning out 75,000 tons of plastic every year, 80% of it single-use. As well as killing her goats, plastic waste was choking waterways and creating breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitoes.