Let’s Do It Ghana, an environmental NGO and its partners have undertaken a four-hour beach clean-up exercise at Laboma Beach in Accra to commemorate the 2023 World Cleanup Day.
About 700 people took part in the exercise in partnership with Pernod Ricard Ghana, Street Sense Organisation, CMA/CGM Ghana, Ghana Recycling Initiative by Private Enterprise (GRIPE-AGI), Ghana Wildlife Society, and Ecozoil.
Mr Lambert Donkor, the Communications Director, of Let’s Do It Ghana and Team Leader for World Cleanup Day 2023, said Let’s Do It Ghana was an umbrella of Let’s Do it World, an international movement tackling environmental and social problems related to mismanaged solid wastes and organisers of World Cleanup Day.
He said: “World Cleanup Day is the largest one-day civic action against wastes, with the aim to raise awareness of the global mismanaged waste crisis and its impact on the environment.
“It is an annual event, which takes place on the third Saturday of September,” he explained.
Mr. Donkor noted that as was done every year, they would conduct a brand audit on the various wastes gathered, and later consult with producing companies whose products happened to be the highest polluters to consider using reusable materials to promote a clean environment.
He emphasized the need for producers to be more committed to waste management efforts by enforcing good practices.
Ms Louisa Kabobah, the Project Manager of GRIPE-AGI, said GRIPE believed in the spirit of partnership and called for galvanizing efforts from everyone to address waste pollution at the beaches and the environment as a whole.
She said beaches were recreational centres and needed to be kept neat and urged the public to desist from polluting beaches to make it a better place for such purposes.
She also called on the public to inculcate the act of segregation of waste products to keep their environment clean as well as to improve their economic status through selling the waste for recycling.
Ms Eunice Osei-Tutu, the Sustainability and Responsibility Manager, Pernod Ricard Ghana a subsidiary of the Pernod Ricard group, a leading producer of wines and spirits, called on producers to consider designing environmentally-friendly materials to prevent pollution of the environment.
She said Pernod Ricard to champion a clean environment had started producing many of its brands without boxes because they had realized that by taking the boxes off they were reducing their contribution to waste pollution.
“We’re slowly unboxing our beautiful bottles as our small contribution towards fighting waste production,” she said, adding that the rest of the company’s brands in boxes will also be unboxed in the future,” she added.
Since 2018, World Cleanup Days have been organized, engaging 70 million volunteers from 197 countries during the last five years.
In 2022, the event brought together 15 million volunteers from 190 countries, using 30 million volunteer hours to collect 60,000 tons of waste from both land and ocean to protect the environment and marine life.
In Ghana, 4,654 volunteers participated in the World Cleanup Day across the country and collected 77,300 kg of waste while about 700 volunteers participated in the main cleanup event at Laboma Beach.
As a result, World Cleanup Day has won many global awards including Mobilise Category Winner in the 2023 edition of the UN SDG Action Awards, a signature programme of the UN.
Ashantibiz
