Plastic pollution is one of the problems on Mozambique Island, where the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama arrived 525 years ago on his way to India, and where the country's first capital was born.

The local economy is centered on fishing and marine resources and plastics are a threat to species, as well as being a threat to the oceans, which are already under pressure due to climate change.

Bottles, lids and all kinds of plastic packaging are picked up on the beaches by scavengers or handed in by restaurants and businesses, piling up in a municipal yard in the center of the island.

This is where a recycling workshop wants to change the course of this pollution story.

"Here we clean, separate the plastic and try to produce new pieces," explains José Júnior, who is responsible for the recycling project implemented by the Portuguese non-governmental organization (NGO) Oikos (in partnership with URB-Africa/UCCLA, among others), supported by Camões - Institute for Cooperation and Language.

Specialized machinery grinds and shapes the plastic into mosaics, tiles, blocks and other pieces that a team of young people from the island perfect every day, now looking for buyers to make the workshop self-sustaining.

The word spreads and children show up at the workshop with handfuls of plastic to sell: today it was Momade Mularanja, one of the recycling operators, who evaluated the waste and handed over 20 meticais (just under 50 euro cents) to the group that came to deliver it.

"It's a sign that people are taking on board the idea" that plastic can be valued if it is removed from the environment and recycled, he says.

"There's a lot of plastic on the market. Packets of pasta, sugar, cookies" and lots of children scattering them, complains Berta Eusébio, a health technician from the municipality of Ilha de Moçambique, who wants to stop the risk of "plastic going to another continent".

It's a process that "will take time", but José Júnior believes that if the solution is born in the community, it will be easier to "mobilize the population for civic action" in which waste stops going to the ground and starts being recycled "without being a threat to the oceans".

The workshop's action is part of a strategy to preserve the sea's resources, which includes projects with communities (with support from Camões and Blue Ventures Conservation) to put an end to rampant fishing - an activity so voracious that today there are boats "that return to land with nothing", says Dane de Almeida, one of Oikos' liaisons with communities, responsible for marine conservation.

The projects are "trying to help communities recover disappearing fish stocks" through management measures that they implement themselves.

You cross the stretch of sea that separates the island from the mainland to reach Cabaceira Pequena, a fishing village where a local management council has been set up and meets with the maritime authorities under one of the village's largest trees.

Living conditions are precarious and the preservation of the greatest wealth, fishing, is being discussed.

Under discussion is the establishment of closed areas, areas demarcated with buoys, where no fishing can take place during a certain period to allow the fish to reproduce instead of disappearing.

"The message we're trying to get across is that you can't take away the little fish," says Fátima Momade, a community activist who, like the rest of the team, recognizes that changing behaviour takes time.

Ossumane Abudu, head of the community fishing council, goes down to the beach and approaches the last boat of the day to arrive at Cabaceira: it's bringing mullet and rabbit fish, which are weighed and sold right there on the beach.

Before returning home, he went out to sea a few kilometers away to check on the buoys marking one of the closed areas where he hopes no one will fish in the coming months.

"We created this last year and it worked because the fish that had disappeared came back. So this year we want to do it again," with regulations and fines for those who violate them, he told Lusa.

"Anyone who goes in and fishes is punished up to 12,000 meticais," about 177 euros.

Manuel João, from the maritime authority, is monitoring the process.

Faced with the "scarcity of fish", this seems to be the right way to go, the one that "will make us happy", he says, and in Cabaceira Pequena, joy means more fish, the center of the entire local economy: with it "everyone wins". (Lusa)