Coastal Watch launches and organize plastic swap event in Osu

The Coastal Watch project's implementers, Project Hope Ghana, on Monday, November 7, 2022, launched and carried out their first plastic swap event at Osu.

The Korle Klottey Municipal Assembly is supporting the event, which is organized in collaboration with SESA Recycling Company Limited and the Ghana Recycling Initiative by Private Enterprises (GRIPE).

The plastic swap event is one of the activities designed under "Coastal Watch: Marine Plastic Education and Awareness Program for Sustainable Development" in the Osu-Korle Klottey Municipality.

The purpose of the plastic swap event is to provide inhabitants of Osu with a means of exchanging plastic for cash. This will economically empower people in these hard times and create awareness of the value of post-consumer plastic waste.

During the activity, a temporary plastic swap booth was set up at the Osu Cemetery area with sounds to create awareness, while volunteers of Coastal Watch and SESA Recycling visited households and local shops in the Osu Lokko Area to speak to them about the effect of indiscriminate plastic waste disposal and the value of plastics.

A tricycle was also made available by the team to assist residents in bringing their plastics to the swap booth and to also instantly weigh plastics from households and pay them on the spot.

Residents of Osu, who participated in the event were excited about the initiative as they do not have to pay extra costs to transport their products long distances to sell them to aggregators.

The majority of the participants were women.

The plastic swap activity, which lasted for 8 hours, recorded a total volume of 247.63 kgs recovered from over 100 residents in Osu. Some of the post-consumer plastic wastes recovered were pure water sachet-LDPE, PP, and PET bottles with PET bottles recording the highest numbers.

Speaking at the activity, Carl Selorm Dovi, the project manager for Project Hope Ghana stated that, the main objective of the Coastal Watch Project is to create avenues that will let the people of Osu see the value of waste especially plastics so that they do not end up in the ocean to destroy marine existence.

He stressed the fact that plastics have enormous value even at their waste stage hence there is a need for more stakeholders to join hands in the fight against plastic pollution to save the environment and ocean from tonnes of plastics that will distract its natural existence, mitigate the menace of climate change and importantly serves as a source of income to people within the plastic value chain.

He added that data and reports generated from the entire project would be efficiently shared with appropriate stakeholders to draw solutions that will make Korle Klottey Municipal Assembly one of the first to achieve a zero plastic pollution status.

Carl further urged the community members to collect more plastics as the plastic swap event will be organized every two weeks till the end of the year, 2022.

Christopher Gyan-Mensah, who is the CEO of SESA Recycling Company Limited said there are many benefits associated with the plastic business hence there is a need for households to take advantage and increase their household incomes.

A waste picker in Osu who released his full sack of plastics thanked the team and said, "I am happy you have brought this initiative to our doorsteps as this will encourage me to collect more without thinking of space since I have been assured a regular collection and instant payment."

Coastal Watch is a project designed by Project Hope Ghana in partnership with the International Sustainability Academy (ISA) under the German Forest Protection Association (Die Schutzgemeinschaft Deutscher Wald, SDW) in Hamburg, Germany, with funding from the United Nations Development Programme’s Global Environment Facility Small Grants Programme (GEF-SGP).

Project Hope Ghana is a registered youth-based non-profit organization run in tertiary institutions across Ghana with a prime objective of empowering the youth to be socially engaged as catalysts for social change.