Five senior high schools in Accra will begin collecting plastic waste this month and selling it to be turned into tiles and roofing, under a bank funded pilot.
OmniBSIC Bank is paying for the scheme, which it launched on 4 June at its Accra head office with two partners: the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s Institute of Industrial Research, which handles the technical side, and the Ocean Tribe Foundation, which runs the teaching. The pilot, called Recovering Plastics for Industry and Sustainable Environment, will run at St John’s Grammar School, Odorgonno, Accra High School, O’Reilly and Armed Forces senior high schools.
Collection cages go into the five schools this month, alongside training for students and staff on sorting, cleaning and storing plastic. Over about three months, students will drop recovered plastic at set points. Companies that buy recovered plastic will then take it and process it into part processed material for local manufacturers, who can turn it into floor tiles, roofing tiles and composite boards. The bank is covering the bins, learning materials, transport and rewards for the students who take part.
The organisers say the five campuses alone throw out about 44,000 pieces of plastic a day, mostly sachet water sleeves and bottles, roughly 60 per cent of their rubbish. The national picture is heavier. Official figures put Ghana’s plastic waste near 0.8 million tonnes a year, though some estimates run past a million, and less than a tenth is recycled. Much of the uncollected plastic clogs drains or washes into the sea, fouling beaches and fishing grounds.
Dr Richard Bayitse, deputy director of the research institute, called the plastic “a misplaced industrial resource.” His labs have spent years working out how to turn it into tiles and building boards, he said, but cannot solve the collection problem without help, which is where the schools come in.
Each school will set up a Green Technology Club. A Plastic Innovation Challenge, due to be announced in October, will ask students to make products from the plastic they recover, with prizes for the strongest schools and pupils at an awards event in November. The bank is also folding in lessons on saving and personal finance through its junior accounts. At the launch it handed the schools copies of a new booklet, “Plastics, the Waste and the Management for Teens.”
Recovery totals from each school will be tallied when the collection window closes. The harder test is whether a five school experiment can grow into something large enough to matter against a problem measured in hundreds of thousands of tonnes.
