The project’s purpose is to start commercial scale recycling plants of 2000T/year waste reprocessing as social enterprises in communities where plastic pollution is most severe, and empower women entrepreneurs to build their own plastic waste management businesses as a sustainable source of income and employment.
CASH IT! Social Enterprise
To fulfill its Mission, ASASE Foundation is launching CASH IT! Operations consisting in Collection Operations and Recycling Plants, in each community where it enters, in collaboration with the Municipal Assembly (local government).
First such CASH IT! Recycling Plant, as a social enterprise, was launched in Nov. 2018 in Kpone-Katamanso. This was scaled up in 2019-2020 to get to the capacity of 2’000T waste collected and reprocessed per year.
In 2022 the second operation was launched in Tema West to reprocess plastic packaging waste collected in the community. Predominantly women, who were previously waste pickers, became formal employees and got training to work in a plant. The Recycling Plant has a capacity of 2000T, does sorting, washing, shredding or grinding of plastic waste, drying and extrusion; it employs 45 people working in 2 shifts, with majority women. In 2022 ASASE also opened a CASH IT! Converting Plant in the third community in Accra, Weija, which takes flakes of plastic from the other two CASH IT! Recycling Plants and produces plastic lumber. This product will be sold for making furniture and light construction as end applications.
CASH IT! Collection Operations are launched in each community where a Recycling Plant is being set up. Their role is to become buying operations for the plastic waste collected from the streets of the community by local waste pickers and from residents and to collect the waste from the community schools.
The ASASE Foundation is managing any CASH IT! Operation until it becomes self-sustainable economically, when the assets are transferred to the employees of CASH IT! and the Foundation opens other new such Operations in a new community.
In 2018, ASASE Foundation commissioned the first Recycling Plant in the Kpone Katamanso Municipal Assembly
In 2024, ASASE Foundation commissioned a cutting-edge Plastic Lumber factory in the Weija Gbawe Municipal Assembly
In 2022, ASASE Foundation commissioned a Recycling Plant in the Tema West Municipality