In Africa, plastic products have penetrated into every aspect of people's lives. Plastic tableware, such as bowls, plates, cups, spoons and forks, is widely used in African dining establishments and homes because of its low cost, lightweight and unbreakable properties.Whether in the city or the countryside, plastic tableware plays an important role. In the city, plastic tableware provides convenience for the fast-paced life; In rural areas, its advantages of being difficult to break and low cost are more prominent, and it has become the first choice of many families.In addition to tableware, plastic chairs, plastic buckets, plastic POTS and so on can also be seen everywhere. These plastic products have brought great convenience to the daily life of African people, from home storage to daily work, their practicality has been fully reflected.
Nigeria is one of the main export markets for Chinese plastic products. In 2022, China exported 148.51 billion yuan of goods to Nigeria, of which plastic products accounted for a considerable proportion.
However, in recent years, the Nigerian government has raised import duties on a number of products in order to protect local industries, including plastic products. This policy adjustment has undoubtedly brought new challenges to Chinese exporters, increasing export costs and making competition in the Nigerian market more intense.
But at the same time, Nigeria's large population base and growing economy also mean a huge market potential, as long as exporters can reasonably respond to tariff changes, optimize product structure and cost control, it is still expected to achieve good performance in the country's market.
In 2018, Algeria imported $47.3 billion of goods from around the world, of which $2 billion were plastics, accounting for 4.4% of total imports, with China being one of its main suppliers.
Although Algeria's import tariffs on plastic products are relatively high, the stable market demand is still attracting Chinese export enterprises. This requires companies to work hard on cost control and product differentiation, by optimizing production processes, reducing costs, and developing plastic products with distinctive features and designs to cope with the pressure of high tariffs and maintain their share of the Algerian market.
The "Macro Plastic Pollution Emission Inventory from Local to Global" published in the authoritative journal Nature reveals a stark fact: African countries are facing serious challenges in plastic pollution emissions.Although Africa accounts for only 7% of global plastic production, it stands out in terms of per capita emissions.With the rapid population growth in the region, plastic emissions per capita are expected to reach 12.01 kg per year, and Africa is likely to become one of the world's largest plastic polluters in the coming decades.Faced with this dilemma, African countries have responded to the global call for environmental protection and issued a plastic ban.
As early as 2004, the small Central African country of Rwanda took the lead, becoming the first country in the world to completely ban single-use plastic products, and further increased the penalties in 2008, stipulates that the sale of plastic bags will face imprisonment.Since then, this wave of environmental protection has quickly spread across the African continent, and Eritrea, Senegal, Kenya, Tanzania and other countries have followed suit and joined the ranks of the plastic ban.According to Greenpeace statistics two years ago, in more than 50 countries in Africa, more than one-third of the countries and regions have introduced a ban on the use of single-use plastics.Traditional plastic tableware has caused great damage to the environment because of its difficult to degrade characteristics, so it has become the focus of the plastic ban action.In this context, degradable plastic tableware came into being and has become an inevitable trend of future development. Degradable plastics can be decomposed into harmless substances through the action of microorganisms in the natural environment, which significantly reduces the pollution of environmental elements such as soil and water.For China's export enterprises, this is both a challenge and a rare opportunity. On the one hand, enterprises need to invest more capital and technical strength, research and development and production of degradable plastic products, which undoubtedly increases the cost and technical threshold of products; But on the other hand, for enterprises that are the first to master the production technology of degradable plastics and have high-quality products, this will be an important opportunity for them to gain a greater competitive advantage in the African market and open up new market space.
In addition, Africa also shows significant innate advantages in the field of plastic recycling. There were Chinese young people and friends together to raise hundreds of thousands of yuan of start-up capital, went to Africa to establish a plastic processing plant, the annual output value of the enterprise as high as 30 million yuan, becoming the largest enterprise in the same industry in Africa.It can be seen that the plastic market in Africa is still in the future!
Post time: Nov-29-2024