Business from Bottles

This project aims to contribute to a circular economy by reducing the use of plastics and by promoting the recycling of plastic bottles, see https://businessfrombottles.wordpress.com/

A concrete activity in this direction is the support for this project in Sierra Leone:

PLASTIC WON’T REACH THE BEACH

1. Project Summary

A large amount of plastic waste in the Western Area of Sierra Leone, where one third of the country’s population live, is directly flushed into the ocean. Recycling projects have focused mainly on the urban area, the capital Freetown, leaving the Western Rural Area largely aside. This project builds on the existing cooperation with 10 schools in the rural area to reduce the use of plastic, collect the plastic waste, and recycle it into useful products that can be sold, creating income that assures the future continuation of the programme. To improve public awareness, plastic related topics are integrated into the school curriculum, and students participate in the collection and processing of the plastic and sales of the resulting products, gaining practical insight and entrepreneurial skills, which will also improve their career perspectives.  

2. Project Rationale and Justification

The ‘Plastic Crisis’ reached new highs in Freetown, when the large amounts of plastic clogged the open sewage in the city and contributed to large scale flooding. Given the geographical area of the Western Rural District on a peninsular, most plastic waste lands quickly in the ocean. The new government has decided on a large-scale clean-up, which creates a ‘window of opportunity’.  More action is needed to increase public awareness, also outside of Freetown, to educate the young generation, and to link plastic recycling to income earning activities to make it sustainable.

3.  Project objective

The project objectives are

• to drastically reduce the amount of plastics that reaches the beaches and the ocean from Sierra Leone’s Western Rural Area,
• to design a context specific curriculum for schools in Sierra Leone on the impact of plastic waste and opportunities for plastic recycling, and
• to assure sustainability of the above activities by linking these objectives to most people’s primary concerns (job, income) by supporting entrepreneurial recycling activities.

4. Problems to be addressed

The primary problem is the tremendous amount of plastic waste that clogs the waterways or reaches the ocean. By addressing this problem, the project also contributes to a more practical school curriculum. Educating recycling entrepreneurs, it helps to reduce youth unemployment, especially of vulnerable youth in the Western Rural Area.  (Increasing employment will also reduce crime in the Waterloo area.)  

5.  Beneficiaries

The project directly addresses teachers and the 3500 students of ten schools in the Western Rural Area.

The curriculum developed and tested at these schools will also be made available to other schools in Sierra Leone.

The concrete practical activities – cleaning-up the area – will directly benefit the 20.000 inhabitants in the schools’ immediate environment  – and ultimately, via a reduction of plastic waste in the ocean – a much broader worldwide community.

An example of a handout for schools can be downloaded here: