Editorial (The Daily Searchlight, 31st March 2022)
Residents and unit committee members of Kpotame, a suburb of Tema Manhean have joined forces to clean the community and desilt the gutters which had been engulfed with plastic bottles and other items.
The clean-up exercise, initiated by Mr. Joshua Teye Agudah, Assemblyman for the Dade Agbo Electoral Area, led to the collection of hundreds of plastic bottles.
Mr. Agudah said that the bottles were believed to have been left at the seaside by some unknown persons who retrieved them from the sea for recycling purposes.
He added that the information he gathered pointed to the fact that because the colored bottles were not fit for the kind of recycling they wanted to do, they dumped them at the seaside which ended up in the gutters, and choked them.
He said the bottles retrieved from the gutters were handed over to the Zoomlion Company for proper disposal.
The Assemblyman said he was in talks with the Tema Metropolitan Assembly (TMA) to train some youth in the area to recycle such plastic waste which abounds in the community into building blocks and other beneficial products.
The Daily Searchlight is of the firm belief that the time may have come for the government to engage the purveyors of plastic products on effective measures of their disposal.
We believe that the manufacturers of plastic products, as well as industries that use plastic containers, have an onerous duty to ensure that their waste does not remain in the environment to harm the same.
That being the case, they must ensure that such waste is removed from the environment. In the absence of such corporate social responsibility, it is incumbent on the government to engage them constructively to ensure that the environment is rid of waste.
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