IT was about five minutes to 10:00am and I was driving to the workshop of Ellen Seldenthuis, a Dutch woman who has set up a workshop in Tamale to engage people in recycling plastic waste into usable items.
As I drove through the alley leading to her workshop, I could not see even a single sachet water bag on the floor, which is unusual of Ghanaian cities like Tamale.
I said to myself that if only one day Tamale and indeed, all cities in Ghana could be like this, how beautiful they would be.
I got to the shop at exactly 10:10am and, as usual, the workshop was buzzing with activity: sowing, sorting, arranging, etc.
“Dasiba,” I greeted, which means Good morning in Dagbani. “N-naa,” Ellen and her team of staff responded.
I was welcomed and given a bench to sit whiles Ellen, who prefers to be called Ibrahim Salimatu, made arrangements to join me for an interview, which we had discussed about the first time I visited.
She was looking very Ghanaian as she wore a nicely-designed African fabric, which the rest of the staffs were also wearing.
“This is our uniform,” she told me. “We wear it on special occasions,” she added.
When the interview started, I asked Salimatu what she was doing in Tamale.
“Well, I have been in Ghana for the past seven years. I worked in Nkoranza where I helped people recovering from mental illness to acquire vocational skills and then I went to the children’s home to help in the upkeep of the children.
“I decided to come to Tamale because I had heard a lot about Tamale and I thought it was about time I came to take up a new challenge in this lovely city,” she stated.
According to her, she loves to introduce or help develop something worthwhile and leave it for others to continue. “So I make myself jobless and look for a new challenge,” she remarked.
Salimatu mentioned that the idea of setting up a workshop to recycle plastic waste into usable items was an afterthought.
Initially, she decided to start a project to coach children on how to keep their surroundings clean and more particularly free of sachet water bags.
“Somewhere along the way, I thought it would rather be more effective to find a way to recycle the sachet water bags so that when we start the education, the children would know what to do with the bags,” she explained.
“So with the help of some donors in Holland, I was able to set up the workshop and I employed only three people to help me,” she mentioned.
That was in August, 2010, she told me. Today, Salimatu’s workshop, which is housed in a metal container and situated at Dagbondab-ba Fong a prominent suburb of Tamale, has made tremendous progress.
The staff strength has risen from three to thirteen (13). The workshop recycles plastic waste, such as sachet water bags and ice cream packs, into school bags, market bags, handbags, purses, shoe rags, caps and raincoats, among others.
Salimatu runs her plastic waste recycling workshop under her non-governmental organisation, known as Tuma Viela (Work is good), and she gives a daily allowance to her employees.
The main focus of the project, according to her, is to clean up the streets of Tamale, educate school children on how to take better care of their environment and to put smiles on many children’s faces by rewarding them with a school bag for helping to make Tamale a better and cleaner place to live.
It is interesting to note that Salimatu charges nothing for the items her workshop produces. All one has to do is to bring the right quantity and choice of plastic waste and demand for a product.
According to Salimatu, one needs to bring at least 250 bags for the making of a school bag, small shopping bag or handbag. Items like raincoats and clothing bags require up to 500 bags, whiles 50 bags are required to produce a purse and other small items.
As she elaborated on this point, young Mubarak walked in with 500 sachet water bags stuffed into a school bag and asked that a clothing bag, nicknamed ‘Ghana must go’ or ‘Alabusa’ in Dagbani, be made for his mother.
The recycling process at Salimatu’s workshop goes through several stages. The process starts with the assembling of the bags, followed by the cut-opening and washing of each bag.
The bags are dried and later sown together to form a long strip of material, before being used to sow a design.
Salimatu indicated that it takes a whole day to form 12 yards of the plastic waste material and it involves about nine people. This, she explained, shows how labour-intensive and time consuming it is to engage in the process of recycling plastic waste.
She concludes therefore that pricing the items would make them unaffordable because the amount would take into consideration all the factors that go into production.
Indeed, there are several angles to Salimatu’s initiative, which need to be appreciated on their merits. First of all, the recycling of waste materials is an important step towards environmental sustainability and sanitation.
According to environment experts, plastic waste materials are classified as non-biodegradable materials and they can stay in the soil for as long as 100 years and over.
Non-biodegradable materials impact negatively on the environment because they damage living things, reduce soil fertility and destroy the landscape.
Managing plastic waste has been a big challenge to the country and experts are still exploring ways of starting an effective recycling industry in Ghana.
Although re-using plastic waste is not the long-term effective solution, it is a temporal solution to the menace of plastic waste. In just about five months when the project commenced, over 500,000 water sachet bags had been gathered by a total of 2051 children in Tamale, Salimatu revealed.
A second angle to Salimatu’s initiative is the job creation aspect of her work. As noted earlier, Salimatu has employed 13 workers, 11 women and two men. The question is what would these workers have been doing if they were not employed by Salimatu? Would they be on the streets begging? Would they join others to commit robbery? These were some of the questions I posed to some of them.
“I really don’t know what I would have been doing by now,” 30-year old mother of two, Amina Aminu told me.
She said since she joined the workshop as a trainee, she has been able to make some few cedis to cater for the needs of her two children, one of whom lost the daddy some few years back.
Amina, who was almost about to shed tears, described Salimatu as her “everything,” adding that without Salimatu, she would have been in serious predicament.
I asked her how she got into the workshop and she explained that she was passing by the workshop one morning when she saw an acquaintance who was working in the shop.
“I expressed interest and she asked me to speak to the white lady. I spoke to her and initially, she resisted, but realising that I was pregnant and desperate for employment, she accepted me into her workshop,” she narrated.
Another employee, Adam Latif, 25, who is one of the two males working at the workshop, told me that he joined the workshop about a year ago through the support of a friend of his.
“My friend leaves in the house adjacent to the workshop and I complained to him that I was not making headway in my work,” he said.
According to Latif, he trained as a tailor and a furniture maker, but was finding things difficult because his family could not support him.
“This work is good for me because I am able to get some money to cater for my needs,” he stated.
What would be the fate of these employees when this project folds up?
The third angle to the recycling project is the positive socialisation and education aspect. Salimatu’s project is training children in Tamale to be environmentally friendly in a unique manner. They get rewarded for ridding their surroundings of plastic waste.
In spite of the good work she and her group are rendering, it appears the political and institutional leadership in Ghana and Tamale in particular have shown very little interest in the project.
I asked Salimatu if any political or institutional head had offered to support the project and she answered in the negative, although she indicated that she had met with the Metropolitan Chief Executive (MCE) of Tamale, Alhaji Abdulai Haruna Friday, who commended her for the initiative.
When contacted, the MCE confirmed having been introduced to the project and added that he had asked Salimatu to return to his office for subsequent discussions.
What remains unknown is when this project would fold up, because as Ellen mentioned earlier, she is operating the workshop with donor funding, which is not sustainable.
“I hope the people and leaders of Tamale would champion this idea when I leave,” she told me, as our 40-minute-long interview came to an end.
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