By Kodjo Adams
Accra, Feb. 24, GNA – Caritas Ghana, a charity organization of the Ghana Catholic Bishops Conference (GCBC), with support from Caritas Korea, has established a recycling plant in the Tamale metropolis to address environmental challenges in the country.
The plant, which is to reprocess plastic materials into other useful items, will help address sanitation problems in the Northern Region.
The income that will be generated from the collection and management of e-waste will support other social needs of deprived communities and the poor.
Mr John Oheneba-Acquah, Communication and Fundraising Officer, Caritas Ghana, said the NGO had established a training programme in garment making at “Pax Garments” in the Sunyani Diocese to create employment for the teeming youth.
These projects form part of two of the seven global goals of Caritas Ghana’s contribution to making operational the encyclical “Laudato Si” action programme which was issued by Pope Francis with a focus on caring for the environment.
The plan includes responses to the cry of the earth, response to the cry of the poor, ecological economics, the adoption of sustainable lifestyles, ecological education, ecological spirituality, and community engagement and participatory action.
Caritas Korea supports Caritas Ghana with an amount of $54,700 to implement goals one (responding to the cry of the earth) and goal two (responding to the cry of the poor).
Mr Oheneba-Acquah said the goals were critical to guaranteeing the future of the planet and called for stakeholder support to respond to the goals.
He said the GCBC had developed a national level action plan under the action programme in response to environmental challenges and as a contribution to the global action programme.
The objective of the programme, he stated, was to sustain the annual tree-planting agenda of GCBC by mobilising all ecclesial communities and diocesan and parish levels to take concrete actions.
He said the GCBC, as part of its pledge to protect the environment, launched a one million tree planting exercise in April, 2021, to support the government’s Green Ghana project, which aimed to plant five million trees in a day across the country.
Reverend Father Dieu Kofi Davor, Director of Communications, GCBC, said the Conference would on March 18, 2023, launch the goal six (ecological spirituality).
He called on Ghanaians to initiate positive measures to protect the environment from destruction and degradation.
GNA