“We have this very common street food. It’s called chiwaya, and it’s just really potato fried on the side of the road, and it’s served in these little blue plastics,” Majiga-Kamoto said. “So because it’s salty, once the goats get a taste of the salt, they just eat the plastic because they can’t really tell that it’s inedible. And they die because it blocks the ingestion system — there’s no way to survive. ”With the goats dying rather than reproducing, the program fell apart, and Majiga-Kamoto became aware of the problems with plastic bags. Not only were they killing goats, but fish and cows were eating plastic, too. The unsightly piles of plastic trash clogging her country’s waterways were breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitoes and cholera-causing bacteria. As such, Majiga-Kamoto led a group of environmental activists who battled the powerful plastics-manufacturing industry for several years before finally getting the Malawi High Court to ban single-use thin plastics in 2019.”