Ghana Youth Environmental Movement (GYEM) has urged government to ban the use of plastic bags to protect the environment.
Single-use plastics are designed to be used for single purposes, they include plastic straws, coffee cups, polyethene bags, plastic cotton buds, food wrappers, and plastic stirrers.
Mr Samual Boadu Duah, Campaigns Lead at GYEM, said plastic bags has been a menace and would continue to be if stakeholders did not take drastic actions to curtail the use of single-use plastics, the environment will be a no place to live.
He stated with concern that climate change issue did not evolve overnight but started gradually and steadily affecting every facet of society through negative attitudes and activities of humans.
He said this at a sensitization campaign in Accra, dubbed “Ban of Single-Use Campaign”, to educate the public, especially market women to desist from single-use plastics and adopt to reusable bags.
Mr Duah stated the problem of climate change could become worse unless the challenge of recycling and ability to turn waste matter like plastic bags to raw material could be addressed.
He encouraged the youth to contribute through their actions and inactions for the nation to achieve environmental best practices for a sustainable environment.
He said that would greatly help in making a positive impact on the environment as the world moved towards a low-carbon economy.
Angelica Elikem, Assistance Programmes officer at Environmental Protection Agency, observed people carried large number of plastic bags home, which could be avoided to control the resultant environmental pollution, adding that the plastic bags ended up in the sea, which produced toxins and eaten by the fishes consumed by “us to negatively affect our health”.
She discouraged the littering of plastic waste, single-use plastics, and encouraged reusable alternatives and segregation of plastic wastes for recycling.
Market women were trained to sew reusable bags to ensure that they are easily available for shoppers to access and use, she said.
She added that “apart from helping to reduce the use of plastic products to prevent plastic pollution, this intervention will also create job opportunities for the unemployed to improve their livelihoods.”
GYEM is a youth-led environmental policy advocacy and non-violent campaign group in Ghana, with its vision to work towards a sustainable environment for future generations.
GNA
