Design that Matters Field Journal

In Search of Plastic

On the way back from the Mali Folkecenter this afternoon, we took a tour through Bamako's Zone Industriel to get a sense for local manufacturing capacity. We found companies working with injection-molded plastics (in the form of shoes and buckets) and sheet metal (for aluminum roofing sheets). There are countless sidewalk arc-welding shops and a booming trade in "pieces detachees"--recycled spare parts--from cars, radios, VCRs and pretty much everything else you could think of.

The roads in the area were pretty wretched. It was only after we'd plunged through a couple two-foot deep mud puddles that our driver Mustafa admitted that he'd been up until almost midnight the night before washing the car.