Features
Innovative business strategies to tackle Ghana’s growing plastic menace
Plastic waste
This time of the year has always been a nightmare for Mavis Adjare.
Seasonal floods have been disruptive for the 45-year-old who makes her living collecting plastic waste and selling it to recyclers.
This year that has changed. Mavis picks 100 kilogramme bags of plastic waste easily at the confluence of the Kpeshieriver and the Atlantic Ocean.
Until mid-2022, the mother of three says, the onset of rain or hot weather threatened her livelihood and the future of her children. Mavis used to comb lorry stations and Accra suburbs -Tseaddo and Teshie – for plastic waste. Now she picks the plastics with ease.
“All I see is plastic waste of different shades, colours and sizes, swimming through the Kpeshie Lagoon into the sea,” Mavis says with joy.
The task of clearing the vast amounts of plastics and other waste that wash onto beaches here has been a major concern for operators of some of Accra’s most popular leisure facilities – theLabadi Beach Hotel and the Labomah Beach – located along the shore.
The waste, 80 per cent of it plastic, is often collected and set ablaze at the shore- a major worry for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which says the practice is a growing source of air pollution in Ghana’s capital. The Kpeshie Lagoon is just one of the many lagoons along Ghana’s 550-kilometer coast through which tonnes of waste plastic leaks into the sea.
Nine per cent of the nearly one million metric tonnes of plastic waste generated in Ghana annually leaks into the ocean, according to the Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation (MESTI). It leaks because so much of Ghana’s plastic waste – nearly 90 per cent – is not properly disposed, clogging up stormwater drains, rivers, and streams and ending up in the oceans, according to a 2020 report by the World Bank.
Many collectors, including Mavis, have joined associations that coordinate their activities to turn ‘waste’ to cash to enhance their livelihoods.
But plastics in the oceans and rivers are impossible for collectors to reach, meaning they miss out on income. They also miss out on income when plastics are burned.
Elvis Oppong, president of the Plastic Waste Collectors Association, says only 20 per cent of plastic bottles and 70 per cent of water sachets are retrieved by the Association.
“Due to lack of space, the majority of the bottle plastics waste are burnt while others go into the marine bodies,” Oppong says.
Plastic waste is now a major global problem. A recent analysis by charity Tearfund found that plastic waste is spiraling out of control across Africa.
It predicts that Africans will discard 116 million tonnes of waste annually by 2060 – a six fold increase from 2019. This is driven by demand for plastic within sub-Saharan Africa.
Plastic waste destroys drainage systems and adds to air pollution but it also threatens food supplies. It has killed so much fish and sea life that many fisheries are on the brink of collapse.
The United Nation Environmental Programme estimates that Ghana’s contribution to global marine debris is as much as 260,000 metric tonnes every year, or one to three per cent of the global total.
UNESCO’s International Oceanography Commission pegs plastic and micro plastics in the ocean at about 50-75 trillion pieces.
The yearly economic costs of plastic in the ocean are estimated to be between $US6-19 billion globally.
A new pilot project launched here in Kpeshie seeks to help solve the problem. River recycle, a Finland-based organisation, is working to remove plastic waste from the world’s waterways while enabling the most affected communities to prosper in a circular economy.
In January 2022, the company and its partners – Beach Clean Up Ghana Limited and Ambitious Africa – began collecting plastic waste from the Kpeshie Lagoon.
The organisation created a ‘trash boom’ — a floating barge stretched across a river – to capture plastic waste as the currents take it downstream. The boom consists of floats made from standard plastic piping, attached to wire mesh barriers that resemble fencing.
The mesh barrier extends into the water to capture pieces of plastic floating below the surface. It is anchored by ropes to the bank of the river.
Mr John Adelegan, who leads the implementation, explains that every river is unique. The team must first gather information to specifically design the plastic recovery system for this river. There have been setbacks – the system was damaged by large floating logs and stumps – but the team redesigned it and has seen improved results.
The changes include the use of steel piles and concrete blocks to make the system more resistant to erosion, high-density polythylene pipe instead of polyvinyl chloride and a second floater to ensure float even if one floater is damaged,” Mr Adelegan explains.
For the first three months, the system collected 30 tonnes of low value (single use) plastics and polyethylene terephthalate (PET). The low value plastics are recycled into boards, which are used to produce furniture, a substitute for wood while the PET is shredded into flakes for export.
With a broad smile, MrAdelegan says already two leading beverage companies have placed orders to buy plastic boards for that.
Finding alternatives for discarded plastic is becoming crucial in countries like Ghana. A visit to communities like Kpong land fill site, Agbobloshie, Mamprobi, Kanashie, Dansoman, Adentan and Jamestown that are becoming overwhelmed with plastic waste makes it obvious how much of a burden it is becoming.
Experts in waste management and environment protection applaud recycling efforts such as the one in Kpeshie. Mr Henrique Pacini, Economic Affairs Officer at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, says embracing the concept of “circularity” – where resources, particularly plastics, are reused and recycled repeatedly – will help fast track development in lower income countries like Ghana.
According to Dr Henry K. Kokofu, Executive Director of the Environmental Protection Agency, the revised policy will focus on prevention and other innovative strategies, including issuing producers who package products in plastic with unique codes, which they will be required to retrieve or face sanctions.
DrKokufo rules out a total ban of single used plastics saying it will be too big a burden on Ghanaian companies and the economy.
The massive work of cleaning plastics from the ocean is not on the agenda for now but at least for people like Mavis and those living around the Kpeshie Lagoon River recyle’s efforts offer relief from the seasonal onslaught of plastic waste and a hope for a cleaner environment for her children. –GNA
Features
The Tema palaver
There is a legend about what Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah wanted Tema to be like.
According to the prophets of the pre-coup era and those who claimed to have known the Osagyefo’s plans, Tema was being gradually developed to become a model city, a workers’ paradise, not a Chinatown.
Today if you see the Meridian Hotel, you’ll think it has just suffered from a bomb attack. Kokotako recently told me he was sure the once elegant hotel was suffering from a virus infection.
Tema, it has been said, was meant to be a thoroughly planned heavenly-city under a presidential blueprint to be eventually decorated with two border posts. You couldn’t enter using bush paths and grasscutter routes. No rat-catching gimmicks!
According to the sages of those times, non-residents of the city on a visit would have been required to go through a bureaucratic and medical procedure.
First you’ll have to produce your passport cum visa, or a travelling certificate, lassez de passe or carte identite (identity card). Your forehead would have to be examined by an expert to make sure you are not a magician. No magical shows in the city. No Kofi Larteh!
You’ll also be required to produce a medical certificate to prove that you’ve been vaccinated against yellow fever, typhoid and poverty. You don’t come to the city to become a beggar. No way!
In a nutshell, the city was meant to become the model city of West Africa, the Vatican of Sikaman; a state within a state, a wonderland of no mean accolade.
The 1966 coup was a national tragedy although Ghanaians hailed the coup. To the Osagyefo, it was a personal tragedy. His dreams of a glorious harbour city, for instance, with its night-time glow and daytime glitter were washed away as the sub-machine guns rattled the signal of the advent of Ghana’s woes.
Nkrumah probably lamented the coup for one main reason that Tema would never be what he visualised it to become. Some people say the tears he shed were laden with an anathema, a bit of which has probably been visited upon Tema.
Yes, visit Tema and you’ll see vestiges of the old plan, now adulterated and totally confused with gross lack of maintenance, irregular development, over-flowing manholes, dark streets at night, beggars, and people who would have been denied access to the comforts of the city, had the Osagyefo been alive.
Tema is no longer for workers. It is now a free-for all, a boiling pot of all ethnic groups like fufu-eating Ashantis, butter-smearing Fantes, akple-eating Ewes, kontomire-swallowing Akwapims, khebab-roasting northerners and Brong self-imposed exiles who would eat nothing apart from unripe plantain. Very delicious, you know.
The shoe-shine boys are in their hundreds and wayside chop bars especially at night are common feature. You’ll be glad to meet an ex-seaman at a drinking bar talking about the good old days when Black Starline was indeed a national line. You’ll notice a retired seaman by his swag for the unmistakable seaman trademark in the gait.
Tema of today is famous for its brand of Pidgin English. It is next to the Nigerian version which is acknowledged by linguistic experts as the cremé of pidgin. Not good for SSS students, though.
The city is also famous for its high cost of living. Those who come from Accra and Kumasi to live there often pack bag and baggage after a few months and run away without anybody chasing them. Sometimes they leave their jackets behind. Life is no joke.
If you can, however, stay in Tema for over five years without suffering from financial constipation, then you are qualified and baptised to live in the ‘hard’ cities of the world including Hanoi, and Bombay. As for Mogadishu, I doubt it. Sometimes you have breakfast once in two weeks and that’s not a cheap situation. You’ve got to bow.
Surprisingly those who live in Tema and have got used to the rough weather don’t want to live anywhere else. They love the city, the breeze, the pidgin.
Today, the new SSNIT flats are giving the city a new class just as fast as the deteriorating conditions of the Tema Development Corporation (TDC)-owned houses are de-beautifying the city. No maintenance whatsoever and the corporation is beset with problems and matters that need redress.
At this very moment, the Tema Tenants Association (TTA) and TDC are at each other’s throat, in a dangerous horseplay that can degenerate into something else. The corporation intends to sell its rented units, meaning that if you can’t buy the house you’re living in, then you’ve got to quit and probably go to your hometown for good.
So whether you are a rich business tycoon or a mandated church mouse, you have to, within three months from now, make ready over three million cedis for the place you are occupying.
There is, however, an alternative. Poor tenants who can’t afford the outrageous prices will from October 1 pay 300 per cent on rent. A single room will now cost 7,000 cedis per month.
Members of the tenants’ association who are ready to take to the streets in protest have accused TDC of having woefully failed as a landlord because it has not maintained buildings it is supposed to maintain.
Some of the buildings are in a real mess.
The association has called for a commission of enquiry to investigate the matter to ensure that propriety and neglect no longer become good bedfellows and also to enable the poor worker and his family to have a place to lay their heads without being intimidated with outright sales and high rents.
The Tema Development Corporation (TDC) itself has a lot of things happening in there, the public would be very much interested in knowing. Many things in fact.
I’ll revisit the issue sooner than you’d expect. Watch out for the bombshell!
This article was published on
Saturday, August 6, 1994
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Features
Tears of Ghanaman, home and abroad
The typical native of Sikaman is by nature a hospitable creature, a social animal with a big heart, a soul full of the milk of earthly goodness, and a spirit too loving for its own comfort.
Ghanaman hosts a foreign pal and he spends a fortune to make him very happy and comfortable-good food, clean booze, excellent accommodation and a woman for the night.
Sometimes the pal leaves without saying a “thank you but Ghanaman is not offended. He’d host another idiot even more splendidly. His nature is warm, his spirit benevolent. That is the typical Ghanaian and no wonder that many African-Americans say, “If you haven’t visited Ghana. Then you’ve not come to Africa.
You can even enter the country without a passport and a visa and you’ll be welcomed with a pot of palm wine.
If Ghanaman wants to go abroad, especially to an European country or the United States, it is often after an ordeal.
He has to doze in a queue at dawn at the embassy for days and if he is lucky to get through to being interviewed, he is confronted by someone who claims he or she has the power of discerning truth from lie.
In short Ghanaman must undergo a lie-detector test and has to answer questions that are either nonsensical or have no relevance to the trip at hand. When Joseph Kwame Korkorti wanted a visa to an European country, the attache studied Korkorti’s nose for a while and pronounced judgment.
“The way I see you, you won’t return to Ghana if I allow you to go. Korkorti nearly dislocated her jaw; Kwasiasem akwaakwa. In any case what had Korkorti’s nose got to do with the trip?
If Ghanaman, after several attempts, manages to get the visa and lands in the whiteman’s land, he is seen as another monkey uptown, a new arrival of a degenerate ape coming to invade civilized society. He is sneered at, mocked at and avoided like a plague. Some landlords abroad will not hire their rooms to blacks because they feel their presence in itself is bad business.
When a Sikaman publisher landed overseas and was riding in a public bus, an urchin who had the impudence and notoriety of a dead cockroach told his colleagues he was sure the black man had a tail which he was hiding in his pair of trousers. He didn’t end there. He said he was in fact going to pull out the tail for everyone to see.
True to his word he went and put his hand into the backside of the bewildered publisher, intent on grabbing his imaginary tail and pulling it out. It took a lot of patience on the part of the publisher to avert murder. He practically pinned the white miscreant on the floor by the neck and only let go when others intervene. Next time too…
The way we treat our foreign guests in comparison with the way they treat us is polar contrasting-two disparate extremes, one totally incomparable to the other. They hound us for immigration papers, deport us for overstaying and skinheads either target homes to perpetrate mayhem or attack black immigrants to gratify their racial madness
When these same people come here we accept them even more hospitably than our own kin. They enter without visas, overstay, impregnate our women and run away.
About half of foreigners in this country do not have valid resident permits and was not a bother until recently when fire was put under the buttocks of the Immigration Service
In fact, until recently I never knew Sikaman had an Immigration Service. The problem is that although their staff look resplendent in their green outfit, you never really see them anywhere. You’d think they are hidden from the public eye.
The first time I saw a group of them walking somewhere, I nearly mistook them for some sixth-form going to the library. Their ladies are pretty though.
So after all, Sikaman has an Immigration Service which I hear is now alert 24 hours a day tracking down illegal aliens and making sure they bound the exit via Kotoka International. A pat on their shoulder.
I am glad the Interior Ministry has also realised that the country has been too slack about who goes out or comes into Sikaman.
Now the Ministry has warned foreigners not to take the country’s commitment to its obligations under the various conditions as a sign of weakness or a source for the abuse of her hospitality.
“Ghana will not tolerate any such abuse,” Nii Okaija Adamafio, the Interior Minister said, baring his teeth and twitching his little moustache. He was inaugurating the Ghana Refugee and Immigration Service Boards.
He said some foreigners come in as tourists, investors, consultants, skilled workers or refugees. Others come as ‘charlatans, adventurers or plain criminals. “
Yes, there are many criminals among them. Our courts have tried a good number of them for fraud and misconduct.
It is time we welcome only those who would come and invest or tour and go back peacefully and not those whose criminal intentions are well-hidden but get exposed in due course of time.
This article was first published on Saturday March 14, 1998
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