Plastic collection

Plastic pollution

I've noticed that there is quite a lot of waste plastic strewn about Gyetiase village, and when I've given children plastic water sachets they often throw the empty sachet on the ground. So for both environmental and educational reasons, I thought it would be good to organise a competition among the junior school children (ages 12-15) to collect plastic rubbish. There will be prizes for the people who collect the most.

Toys for prizes

I asked a teacher if he thought it was a good idea, and he was enthusiastic. We decided we could give the children from 2pm to 3:30pm to collect the plastic the following day, and have the prize-giving immediately afterwards. The teacher would organise and inform the children from Form 1 and Form 2, totalling about 50 children.

My son Sebastian had given me some of his surplus toys to take to Ghana, so I decided to use some of those as prizes.

Based on the suggestion from the teacher, I also bought some pens and exercise books locally, and some mathematical instruments (ruler, protractor, triangle, etc.). We decided to give 15 prizes, so that the children would have a one-in-three chance (approximately) of winning one.


I was amazed and pleased at how seriously the children took the competition. After about an hour, they all arrived with big sackloads of plastic. But the prize-giving was hard to organise.

Calm before the storm

We had 18 prizes in total, and 49 children. I tried to select those that had the biggest collection, but it quickly descended into chaos, with a lot of shouting "me, me". I think that we got it approximately right.

The village looks quite a bit cleaner now.

Some of the plastic we collected.
Each sack is full of waste plastic