Voltic holds third ‘Community Buyback Programme’

By Hafsa Obeng, GNA   

Accra, July 23, GNA - Voltic (GH) Limited at the weekend organized its third “Voltic Community Buyback” programme at Labadi, a suburb of Accra.

The programme is a monthly initiative by Voltic to educate the public about the negative impact of littering of plastic waste and the need to segregate plastic waste for recycling.

The initiative is also to further demonstrate that plastic waste has economic value as they can be sold and recycled into other products.

Mr Francois Gazania, the Managing Director of Voltic, said the company held the view that every plastic package had value and life beyond its initial use and that those packages should be collected and recycled into either a new package for beneficial use.

He said it was unacceptable that the plastic packages ended up in the wrong places in the oceans and gutters and that Voltic was making efforts at engaging stakeholders’ to create ecosystems to drive collection.

He said the initiative which started in June was aimed at educating the public on the negative impact of littering with plastic waste and the need to segregate plastic waste for recycling purposes.

“The Buyback is premised on the understanding that once people know that they can segregate and sell their post-consumer plastic waste for recycling purposes, they will cease littering and the accompanying negative impact to the environment will be eliminated.”

Mr Gazania said the initiative was more important to the company because it also uses plastics for packaging and believes it had a responsibility to that.

“As a company using plastics as part of our packaging, we believe we have a responsibility to help manage our post-consumer waste in a sustainable manner with all stakeholders in the value chain.      

“This is why waste management is one of our three major sustainability/ CSR focus areas, the 3Ws - Women, Water & Waste (Women Empowerment, Water Stewardship and Waste Management).  So the Community Buyback falls squarely in line with our sustainability focus on waste management,” he added.

He said the community outreach, which was organized every third Saturday of the month, had since been held at Glefe near Dansoman and Mandela Park in Osu, and would run for two years.

Mr Gazania said Voltic had over the past years engaged various stakeholders to create an ecosystem that drove collective sustainable action towards managing our post- consumer plastics, and their goal was to work together with other stakeholders to set up collection points in communities in line with their ambition of collecting and recycling 100 per cent of our post-consumer waste by 2030.

He said Voltic was embarking on this initiative in partnership with Coliba and with support from Cola Cola, Total Petroleum, University of Ghana Plastic Recycling Project (UGPRP), Green Alliance, Cyclolyte and recently YALI Cohort 14-Ghana.

He said “120 volunteers drawn from the various partners move out in groups to educate the community while also picking up littered waste. The plastic waste collected by the volunteers, together with those already segregated by the community, because of the advance notice of the buyback, is bought by Coliba for recycling. After the event, Coliba goes in to buy from the community every fortnight.”

He noted that a total of 4.2 tonnes of plastics had been collected and bought since the inception of the Community Buyback. The fortnight buybacks have also so far yielded in total 0.5 tonne of plastics.

“These wastes would have otherwise been left in the environment or into the water bodies. By this action, we are helping to create awareness on economic and environmental value of plastics. It is no more waste but a resource.”

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