The Grand finale of recycle up was filled with great ideas from all the participants from the various schools which was above imagination, considering the rate at which these young students exhibited their maximum best so as to brainstorm to generate these fantastic ideas on how to solve the improper waste management issues within the country as a whole especially plastic waste. The solutions generated by the participants together with their mentors are as follows;
The first team’s project was the Interplast project where they described “Interplast” as an amalgamation of the two words “intermediaries” and “plastics”. their goal was to connect the local people of our case study area to other people who would serve as intermediaries to the big recycling firms and to ensure that the amount of plastic waste in the community would be drastically reduced upon realization that to be able to get the locals to not indiscriminately dispose but send over their plastic waste, there will be the need to educate them; help them clean up their community by organizing communal labour; provide bins; and providing incentives for those who submit their plastic waste.
The second team also wanted to serve as an intermediary between the people and the recycling firms as well giving the assumption that Ghana has a population of about 24 million and health personnel advise us to take at least 8 cups of water a day which can be linked to 8 sachets of water. Therefore, about 192 million sachets are perceived to be produced each day. This makes the sachet readily available and since they are of high demand, #Team Jay seek to create an intermediary committee between the people of Asem community, specifically Kumasi Anglican Senior High School to collect these sachets and then transfer them to the recycling firms.
The next idea was “The CUP project” which focuses on a public campaign approach to waste management. In the short term, the team proposes a major clean up exercises in heavily polluted communities. In the long term, the team proposes the establishment of a Plastic Art Education Center where people will be trained to make good use of waste plastic materials through creative non-chemical processes and awareness creation.
The fourth idea from Team Spider also seeks to use technology coupled with local techniques to convert ‘waste’ plastics to usable fuel. They are giving plastics a chance to at least ‘die’ for a good purpose. Plastics To Fuel (PTF) machines will be made available at selected communities in the long term to drastically reduce plastic waste.
The fifth team was The Engineers’ Group who came out with a project named the SAAS ATMOS 7000 Recycler machine. The machine was a small recycling plants which will convert all types of plastics into small pellets. These pellets will further be used as raw material for the production of other plastic products. The Plants consist of a Shredder machine, a Melting Chamber, Cooling trough and a cutting machine. The Plastic will first be washed manually and then fed into the shredder, which will shred the plastics into smaller pieces. The shredded plastics are then introduced into the melting chamber which melts the plastics and allowed to go out through an outlet into the trough which contains water for cooling. The recycled plastics are cut into pellets by the cutting machine and sold to plastic producing companies.
Team Waste Hunters after revealing the numerous dangers associated with plastic waste in our communities decided to adopt a chain of solution to solving this societal bane in the Ghanaian society. The group adopted a 3-phase approach to solving this problem. The first phase basically sought to educate the general public about the dangers associated with indiscriminate disposal of waste ranging from flooding as a result of gutters choked with plastic waste materials, malaria and cholera outbreak. The Second phase was the provision of dustbins at vantage points in the community with different colors. Collection of these waste will be done with the common motor vehicle known as `ABOBO YAA` in tge twi parlance. Phase 3 follows with the recycling phase where students partnered with recycling firms in the purchasing of the plastic waste collected from the vantage points.
All the ideas from the participants were received in good faith but it is said that to every fight there should be a winner so we managed to bring on board prominent people from the EPA, KMA, TEOG and were made to serve as the Jury for the program and upon critical analysis of the group presentations made by the participants. They came to a conclusion that Team Spider should be judged the winners whose presentation was basically the production of fuel using abandoned plastic waste and Team Jay was made the second runner up who also gave a presentation on their team serving as an intermediary between the people of the Asem community starting with KASS and the recycling firms within Kumasi.
The judges based their judgment on the feasibility, sustainability, impact on the environment etc. so as to select the deserved ideas to receive the seed funding in order to implement their fantastic ideas they presented.
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