Two bodies support project to reduce plastic waste

Two non-governmental organisations are in partnership to support women entrepreneurs working to reduce plastic litter in communities.

The initiative, called ‘Closing the Loop’, is to enable local communities to benefit from discarded plastic waste by collecting, reprocessing and reselling them.

Launched in 2018, the partners provided seed money to equip a plastic waste reprocessing plant as well as technical and business management training to women entrepreneurs to run the recycling plant for profit.

The recycling plant processes a range of plastic waste, including water sachets, shampoo and detergent bottles and large cooking oil containers, converting them into regrinds.

The regrinds are then sold to recyclers to make items such as pavement blocks, sheets for construction, basins and liners, most of which go back into the community.

The project has already created eight jobs in Accra and diverted 35 tonnes of plastic from waste in its first 12 months of operation since 2018.

Partnership

A statement issued by the two organisations, the Alliance to End Plastic Waste (the Alliance) and the Accra-based Asaase, said with the partnership, the capacity of the reprocessing plant would increase, diverting 2,000 tonnes of plastic waste per year, creating more jobs in the process.

The initiative, according to the statement, would directly benefit people living in areas which did not have access to plastic waste collection and sorting systems.

The Alliance to End Plastic Waste includes companies that make, use, sell, process, collect and recycle plastics, including chemical and plastic manufacturers, consumer goods companies, retailers, converters and waste management companies.

 Asaase Foundation was also created in 2017 to enable Ghanaian women entrepreneurs to play a key role in cashing in on the plastic waste trash of Accra for the benefit of their own communities.

Expertise

The statement added that the partnership had  opened the possibility to bring in expertise from an academic partner, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in areas as developing new end market applications and developing the concept of a new financing system for the management of plastic waste in the country.

“A key pillar of ending plastic waste in the environment is the sustainable impact it will bring to the well-being of local communities. This is why our partnership with Asaase is especially meaningful because Closing the Loop is the right step towards a circular economy model,” the President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Alliance to End Plastic Waste, Mr Jacob Duer, said.

“What we value most in our partnership with the Alliance to End Plastic Waste is the access to the expertise in waste management which we can leverage now in our project, effectively multiplying the impact of the funding provided by the alliance to our project,” the Founder and Managing Director of Asaase Foundation, Ms Dana Mosora, also said.