How Covid-19 changed everything…

The global spread of Covid-19 had an effect on virtually every aspect of our lives and businesses. Whether you were a teacher or a shop keeper, your life has changed drastically since this global pandemic began. For our ASASE Foundation, the lockdown and obvious shift in our day-to-day lives have changed everything about the way we work. 

Initially we knew we needed to figure out, like the rest of the world, what everything meant and also come to terms with the fact that this pandemic was not going away. We knew things would have to change if we wanted to keep working and ensure we could contribute to keep the community clean and provide jobs to our team. 

Step one was to simply educate about safety and provide information that would ease the fear and slowly re-energize the community. As you may have read in our previous blog posts, we did this by distributing flyers across the community while providing safety information. 

After addressing the initial shock of Covid-19, we began to see the true impact it was going to have on ASASE. For example, one issue we knew we needed to overcome was the temporary loss of the volume coming from SESA Recycling in our collection chain. Due to Covid-19, all SESA’s collection locations have been shut down: schools, churches, open markets. To adapt to this tremendous change, we shifted the way we communicated by encouraging the community to collect plastic waste at home. This may seem like a small change but it required moving from encouraging collection in public areas to a different strategy. The new approach called for new effort on our part to hit the ground running and start educating residents close to their homes about the importance of plastic waste separation and the benefits of collection from homes. 

Today, so much of what we had planned has changed completely and we anticipate it will continue to change. Nevertheless, we are ready. Waste collection is a public health and safety issue and, most importantly, recycling brings economic benefits to the communities that we are dedicated to. We will continue to work tirelessly towards our ultimate goal of creating a sustainable recycling system while providing jobs and opportunities to our local communities. Covid-19 may change our journey but our goals remain the same. 

Stay tuned to learn more about our journey and how we continue to move towards the future with positive spirits and strive to reach our goals no matter the obstacles.