Written by: Dorcas Aba Annan- Global Communications & PR Professional
The ASASE Foundation, a non-governmental organization, was founded to provide a platform for the inspiration and empowerment of women and beyond, by offering seed money and technical and business training to build their plastic waste reprocessing plant and manage it as a social enterprise. It is acknowledged that recycling alone will not solve plastic pollution, but it is a powerful and proven way to alleviate the problem and slow down the accumulation of waste. Thus, tackling plastic pollution starts with product design and steering plastic use to those packaging solutions where their functionality benefits outweigh negative environmental impacts.
The innovative solutions described below, have been developed by ASASE Foundation to inspire scale-up such as it will create a measurable impact at the country level. As such, continuous transfer of know-how from the Global North, transfer of appropriate technology, and impact funding with patience, to deliver on financial goals, are the key ingredients to realize the necessary impact.
CASH IT! Initiative
The CASH IT! manufacturing operations is an innovative solution under the “Close the Loop of Plastic Packaging” project in Ghana where all the reprocessed plastic waste is converted to plastic lumber by CASH IT! Plant or sell to recyclers in Ghana who produce industrial-scale construction sheets, household items like buckets, bowls, baskets, or industrial items like garbage bins or polytanks. The project involves starting small recycling plants as social enterprises in communities where plastic pollution is most severe and empowering women entrepreneurs to build their plastic waste collection businesses as a sustainable source of income and employment.
The foundation, in collaboration with the respective Municipal Assemblies (local government), has successfully constructed a CASH IT! Recycling Plant in the Kpone Katamanso Municipality and one in the Tema West Municipality (both in Accra) to reprocess plastic packaging waste collected in the community. Each plant has a standard capacity of 2’000T reprocessed per year, which is determined by the amount of waste generated by the community and the optimal scale to allow reprocessing to be profitable when full capacity is achieved. This secures the financial sustainability of the recycling operation. In 2022, another CASH IT! Converting Plant was built in the Weija Gbawe Municipality to use the plastic flakes from the other two CASH IT! Recycling Plants and set up to start production of plastic lumber. This product is sold into making furniture and light construction as end applications and by its downstream integration it improves the long-term economic viability of the recycling business.
Associated with the recycling plants, CASH IT! Collection networks are being set up to channel the plastic waste collected from the streets of the community by the local waste pickers and from residents towards the CASH IT! Recycling plants. The Collection networks are made of Collection centers and/or collection points managed by ASASE collection agents.
Each collection Center is equipped with
- a shack for storing working tools and protection equipment (scales, recording books, collection and transportation bags and sacks and protection equipment)
- a shelter for workers at the center to perform sorting and bagging activities and a space large enough to store material collected during the week and the collection tricycles.
When in one community area a collection center is not set up, a collection point with an agent will be organized such as to receive waste from the houses of residents, waste pickers, schools, and community businesses.
Ghana is working through the National Plastic Action Partnership towards the creation of an EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) Scheme, but until then ASASE Foundation is using the International Plastic Credits system to finance the operating cost of the various CASH IT! operations. Up to now, the operations have been built with seed money from grants provided by the European Commission (EuropeAid program) or the Alliance to End Plastic Waste.
Involvement of schools in the communities
To pave the way for a more sustainable future, the ASASE Foundation has intervened in over 104 schools to teach students about waste management, segregation, and recycling. Students also help collect and sort their plastic waste, which is then collected by the foundation and recycled in the CASH IT! facility. The Foundation’s approach to holistically supporting the community has called on the need to include schools in the various communities affected by plastic littering.
The foundation has collected over 1.2 tons of materials (flexible plastic and PET bottles) from 18 active schools in the Tema West municipality, during two quarters for 2024 demonstrating a significant effort to engage schools in responsible waste management practices and contribute to the overall goal of recycling plastic waste. This year, 20 schools have been selected in the WGMA to receive training on plastic waste management, which will serve as a proactive approach to ensure a systematic and comprehensive engagement with schools in different regions and promote sustainable waste management practices among students and staff. The information gathered from the schools selected in the WGMA will be used to tailor training programs, identify specific challenges, and implement targeted solutions.
Women Empowerment
The foundation seeks to enable Ghanaian women entrepreneurs to play a key role in cashing in on plastic waste trash for the benefit of their communities. An informal network of women waste workers is the backbone of the local recycling industry. These women are often the poorest faces of their communities and are regularly discriminated against for working in the waste sector. Without these women, Accra’s plastic waste would build up in local neighborhoods, as well as leak into the environment and nearby ocean. Without these recycling jobs, these women would likely face unemployment. To empower women waste pickers and aggregators to efficiently and safely develop their collection and aggregation businesses, the foundation has:
- Built their capacity in financial literacy for the growth of their businesses
- Provided health and safety training and support to improve their working conditions
- Enabled cost-effective transportation and logistics to facilitate plastic collection
In all, women, who were previously waste pickers, have become formal employees and received training to work in a plant. Thus, 100 people, working in 2 shifts, have been employed already to work in the 2 recycling plants in Kpone Katamanso and Tema West, with the majority being women.
The ASASE Foundation innovated by creating community-based social enterprises that engage deep in the community to mobilize, in collaboration with the local government, the resources necessary to create awareness about the plastic litter problem and the opportunity to cash in the value of plastic waste, when collected and recycled in the community.