Last Saturday, I gave my neighbour, Auntie Felicia (not her real name), a plastic bag counting assignment. She owns a shop, in-built into her front wall. She sells provisions (milk, Milo, sugar, soaps, margarine, PK, yoghurt, bread, etc.) and several other items in her shop. Hers is like any typical shop scattered throughout Ghana.
There are six of such shops on my street alone – the tarred portion; the supposedly privileged part where I live my supposedly privileged life. There are more of such shops beyond, where tar has never touched; might never touch in this generation.
In my estimate, there are about 100 of such shops in my general neighbourhood. I wonder if anyone is responsible for counting shops in the country, let alone, to imagine the quantities of single-use plastics that are given away in shops and markets throughout Ghana.
Join me on a brief trip through major markets in Ghana. While on the trip, imagine the quantities of single-use plastics in which traders package assorted items to their customers. Some of the major markets are: Makola, Madina, Malam Attah, Nima, Agbogbloshie, Kasoa, Kintampo, Tamale Central, Bawku, Walewale, Salaga/Sraha, Bodjoase, Asafo and Techiman markets, among several others.
Now, let’s return to Accra, to my neighbour’s shop. Here are the results of Auntie Felicia’s assignment last Saturday. From about 6:30 in the morning when she opened the shop for business until she closed about 9:30 pm, she gave out the following single-use non-biodegradable plastic bags as packaging for customers.
The smaller size black plastic bags are known as “Take Away”. She gave out 88 pieces of those. She also gave out 102 medium size black plastic bags and an additional twelve pieces of the large size black plastic bags.
Some single-use thin transparent plastics, called “Margarine Rubber”, also made the rounds from her hands. That’s the type used to package items like bread, scooped margarine (that’s probably how it got its name!) and anything sold in smaller quantities, so small that the manufacturer did not foresee or was not interested to package. Auntie Felicia gave out 21 of those margarine rubber bags last Saturday.
Another avenue for dishing out single-use plastics into the environment is the naughty ‘Pure’ water in sachets (packets). Auntie Felicia sold 77 sachets of “Pure” water last Saturday. How pure the water is, no one can tell. Yet, it is a free-for-all big business.
Petty trading overwhelms our national landscape. From ‘table-tops’ to full-blown shops built into walls of most houses which are located near roadsides; from properly designated markets with numerous market stalls to young and old hawkers who parade street shoulders. Wherever you turn, someone is selling something. Not that there is anything wrong with trading. My mother is a trader too! It is the indiscriminate and mindless use of plastics to package just about everything sold that must trouble us.
Who is counting the sheer volume of non-biodegradable single-use plastics that is produced, imported and mindlessly used in this country everyday, every week, every month and every year? Who is doing the maths to put a finger on the quantities? We must know the quantity, so we would see the urgency in putting a stop to it.
Let’s do a little multiplication of the quantity of plastics Auntie Felicia gave out last Saturday by a few thousands to figure out the quantities on the national level for one day. Conservatively speaking, let’s multiply Auntie Felicia’s single-use plastics give-aways of one day by only three thousand. This would include different plastic give-away locations like markets, shops, hawkers, petty traders and stationary roadside sellers.
That would give us a rough guesstimate (guess plus estimate) of quantity of single-use plastics in Ghana in just one day as follows: medium size plastics – 306,000 pieces, small size ‘Take-away’ plastics – 264,000, thin transparent ‘margarine’ rubber – 63,000 pieces, large-size black plastic bags – 36,000 pieces and ‘Pure Water’ sachet plastics – 231,000 pieces.
A guesstimated total single-use plastics we dump into the environment in one day is a whopping 900,000 pieces, close to one million! Note again that these figures only represent one day of single-use plastics.
As you read this, give a thought to your personal plastic bag life. Yes, we all lead plastic bag lives. Koko, kokonte, fufuu, groundnuts, roasted plantains, soup, and banku -- all come packaged to us in multiple plastic bags. Adults, the youth, children, men, women, rich and poor and everyone up and down the social ladder lead a plastic life.
A story. I entered the office of a senior government official about 8:30 in the morning. He was sucking Hausa Koko from a thin transparent plastic. Yes, a grown man was sucking koko like a child sucking the mother’s breast. Oddly, he found nothing wrong with it. The nastiest thing I saw recently was a group of school-going children in uniform sucking banku and soup from plastics.
These are bizarre examples of our mindless use of plastics. After the sucking, we just toss the plastic into the environment, never thinking of what happens to plastics when they leave our hands after a single use.
Too many things are packaged in single-use plastics. Very often, things are packaged in multiple plastics, one inside the other and inside yet another. And when we throw garbage away, we do so with the multiple plastics confusingly interwoven in our garbage. Plastics therefore are literally inseparable from other garbage because plastics have become the foundation – yea, the character of our garbage.
In the past week, a sanitation company that is trying to enter the Ghanaian market staged a demonstration of their products. The company is named Bola Solutions. What an interesting name! Yes, Ghana needs desperate solutions to its bola problems. Before Independence in 1957, our solid waste was incinerated so it was nicknamed ‘bola’ after the hard-to-pronounce word, broiler. Those days, garbage was simple and could easily be burnt and reduced to ashes.
But now, our bola is very complicated, made more complex with scientific and technological inventions like plastics, computers and cans which are tough and do not readily lend themselves to incineration and to easy solutions.
Bola Solutions treated a container-full of garbage with the application of enzymes and after one week, we re-visited to observe its new status. In one week, much of the bola of old (left over food, etc.) had quenched. But a heap of bola was left untouched. It comprised of the items which are at the heart of our waste management quagmire: plastics, lorry tyres, electronic parts and cans.
Poor people’s bola is too complicated. As a student in a previous life elsewhere, I benefited from picking good stuff (TV, desk, chair) from privileged people’s bola. But poor people’s bola is true bola, difficult to find much that is usable. It’s rendered in worst condition because we don’t segregate; everything is jumbled together to form one big ugly filthy mess of garbage.
I shudder to imagine what Ghana would become five to ten years from now if we do not ban non-biodegradable plastics. Every day, every week, every month, every year, we pile up unknown quantities of plastics which are not decomposing. We are irresponsibly committing a collective national act of insanity.
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