Residents of Kpotame clear gutters of hundreds of plastic bottles

Tema, March 30, GNA – Residents, and unit committee members of Kpotame, a suburb of Tema Manhean have joined forces to clean the community and desilt the gutters which had been engulfed with plastic bottles and other items.

The clean-up exercise, initiated by Mr Joshua Teye Agudah, Assemblyman for the Dade Agbo Electoral Area, led to the collection of hundreds of plastic bottles.

Mr Agudah told the Ghana News Agency in Tema during the exercise that the bottles were believed to have been left at the seaside by some unknown persons who retrieved them from the sea for recycling purposes.

He added that the information he gathered pointed to the fact that because the coloured bottles were not fit for the kind of recycling they wanted to do, they dumped them at the seaside which ended up in the gutters, and choked them.

He said the bottles retrieved from the gutters were handed over to the Zoomlion Company for proper disposal.

The Assemblyman said he was in talks with the Tema Metropolitan Assembly (TMA) to train some youth in the area to recycle such plastic waste which abounds in the community into building blocks and other beneficial products.

He said apart from creating job avenues for the youth, it would also help solve the plastic menace and its resultant effects on the community.

Touching on the clean-up exercise, he said he received several reports of choked gutters and an increase of mosquitoes in the area, and therefore initiated the two-day clean-up which started from the drains from Manhean School junction to Don Bosco.

Mr. Agudah said the Assembly supported the effort by fumigating the entire electorate a day before the clean-up to ensure that mosquitoes and other insects were gotten rid of.

He urged residents to participate in the ‘operation clean your frontage’ exercise which was initiated by the Greater Accra Regional Minister as part of measures to make Accra work again.

GNA