With the exception of Sunday dawn, Susanna Klugah, is often up during the wee hours to pick used water sachets and bottles. Waking up early enables her to trek in good time from her home around the Ashaiman market, one of the busiest markets and bus terminals in Ghana’s capital city Accra. Not going early means she might lose her picking spot, which other pickers linger around to take. ‘I cannot afford not to go picking because it is my livelihood. The plastic waste collection is a big deal for me, because without that my two children will starve and not get educational materials,’ she tells the Ghana News Agency. It is a booming business, which earns her an average of GHS 1100 (100USD), a month from the sale of plastic materials collected. Susanna is just one of the thousands in the plastic waste value chain making a living and taking care of the needs of her dependents. Mismanagement of plastic waste remains one of the biggest challenges to the country with more than one million tonnes of plastic waste generated every year, according to the National Plastic Policy. The policy suggests that domestic manufacturing accounts for less than five per cent of all plastics entering the economy. However, there is a ready market for waste plastics, especially the single used ones and bottles. The bottles are not only processed, shredded and sold, but are used for a number of products. In Ghana, some 120 companies manufacture over 52,000 tonnes of various plastics and plastics products per year. Cynthia Akoto has moved on from collecting plastic waste to selling plastics and given it a second life. Trained by Environment 360, a not-for-profit organisation under the Circular Innovation Hub, more than a year ago, she’s able to produce a number of plastic products. ‘I look at the rate on the market and decide what to do with plastics,’ she says. Some 29 others, Cynthia’s cohort, are also flourishing in the plastic business. Last year, Cynthia and her cohorts recycled nearly one ton of plastics into beads, buttons and coasters and generated nearly GHC50,000. Women associated with the project have raised nearly 200 per cent of their investments, says Ms Selasi Charwe-Glover, Project Manager at Environment 360. The Circular Innovation Hub is seeking to support entrepreneurs from marginalised groups by developing a machine time share model that allows them to become small-scale recyclers and decrease the amount of plastic within their communities. The Hub, she says, needs technical, academic and private partnerships that support the decentralisation of recycling and improved technology and processing methods. It also needs academic partnerships that can facilitate research to support transition into the green economy. Dr LaShanda Korley, the U.S. Department of State Science Envoy, is happy about the innovation and how the women have been empowered to add value to the waste materials. ‘This is a learning process in the plastic waste value chain. There is more we can learn and work on in the space to beat plastic,’ she says during a visit to the Pick- it centre at Tema in the Greater Accra Region as part of the plastic recycling workshop. ‘I am a scientist, and science is only as good as understanding the nature of the problem. The innovation here is fantastic, and many people need to know about this. Africa has a stronger sense of circularity and needs to be upscaled.’ Dr Korley acknowledges that plastic waste pollution is one of the climate crises humanity is facing and says it is important to put in more effort to make the plastic circular economy work. While stakeholders, including Environment 360, are working to take off a small fraction of the plastic waste menace, the government says it is working to enforce the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) system to manage plastic waste in the country. The EPR is a strategic policy intervention whereby the estimated environmental costs associated with a product throughout the product’s life cycle are added to the market price of that product, especially in the waste management sector. Currently, the Ministry is working on a law that will make the EPR mandatory for all producers or marketers of plastic products in the country, says Madam Lydia Essuah, the Director of Policy, Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation at Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation. ‘We want to ensure that once you put out a plastic product on the market, you are mandated by law to collect it. In this regard, you have to make sure that as part of your marketing arrangement, you put in place a collection system so that anyone who buys your product knows where to take the waste to after using it,’ she says. While waiting for a holistic intervention by the government, the likes of Susanna and Cynthia can only give second life to a small portion of plastic waste leaving the rest to clog up stormwater drains, rivers, and streams and end up in the oceans.

Source: Ghana News Agency