Everywhere I look there are plastic bottles. All of them (I would say 99.5%) are empty 600ml water bottles, discarded along with most other trash, on the side of the road.
Sometimes children collect them for their mums to put homemade mango juice or honey in, but mostly they are just left to be trampled under foot or crushed by car wheels, or nibbled on by a goat, until someone heaps them and other trash into a pile and burns it.
Most of the water comes from the Nile, either here or in Uganda, and is filtered and bottled in South Sudan. It's one of the few items that is not imported, and therefore costs 1 or 2 South Sudanese Pounds (20- 40 cents) a bottle, so everyone (foreigners and locals) drinks dozens of them. It's the only way to ensure the water you are drinking, or using to brush your teeth, is clean. It took me a week or so to get into the habit of cleaning my toothbrush with bottled water, how my hand just desperately wanted to reach out and turn on the tap!
Dirty drinking water is a serious problem in South Sudan. Water-borne illnesses result in half of all hospital admittances and many premature deaths. In one county alone, an NGO found that half of the 238 water sources were contaminated with e-coli bacteria.
So I can understand why people drink bottled water, but I can't imagine why people aren't recycling the bottles. It would not only clear the paths, prevent more toxic gases being released into the environment when they are burnt (after all, South Sudan has signed up to the Montreal Convention to prevent the release of ozone-depleting gases into the environment), but also provide extra income to families who have little beyond a chicken and a goat.
But the problem, as you may have anticipated, is that there are no recycling plants here. Thousands of aid workers gulping a gazillion bottles of water a year, and no one thinks about the environmental impact. Come on, someone out there must want to set up a recycling plant!
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