Group Engages Stakeholders On Plastic Pollution Policy

The Green Globe Initiative, GGI, an NGO, on Tuesday, engaged environment stakeholders on the need for plastic policy in Kwara State, North-Central, Nigeria, to address the pollution crisis in the state.

The GGI Executive Director, Mr Akintola Akinyemi, said the discussion was in order to build a future of sustainable ecosystem in Kwara.

He said the collective contributions and insights of each person were crucial to developing a document that would help the State Government formulate and adopt plastic policy tools.

“The policy will be in a bid to regulate production, trade, transportation and utilisation of single use plastic in the state so as to safeguard our ecology and posterity.

“We are not here to stop businesses, rather, we want to help businesses in the plastic value chain in the state to have an improved business environment and opportunities in the circular economy system in Kwara,” he said.

The GGI boss said the mindset attached to the climate change phenomenon made it look less personal.

“But plastic pollution crises, flooding, and associated loss and damages absolutely impair our lives personally and collectively as a state.

“Therefore, strategic steps to protect, restore and conserve life on land and life below water is the only blueprint to our survival and sustainability in the Kwara State Environment,” Akinyemi said.

In his paper presentation, Dr Lawal Olohungbebe, the Senior Special Adviser to Gov. AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq on Community Engagement urged the government to involve all stakeholders in the policy formulation.

Olohungbebe, who spoke through Mr Abdulrasheed Adio, said five major stakeholders, among others, should be carried along in the plastic policy formulation.

He named them as “the Academia, Government and regulatory bodies, manufacturers, traders and distributors as well as recyclers and scavengers.”

The aide called for the collaboration and commitment of all the stakeholders to ensure the implementation and enforcement of the policies when enacted.

Another paper presenter, Mr Musa Aliu, the chairman, Health Promotion, and Advocacy Agency, called for a national policy on plastic waste management, which should be a working one from the federal to the local level.

Aliu also called for education on plastic pollution from the elementary stages in schools to catch them young and the engagement of communities in terms of advocacy and sensitisation.

The state director of Environment,  Ministry of Environment, Mr Abayomi Idowu, said plastic pollution had been a crisis in the environment and promised that the state government would implement recommendations arrived at by discussants

At the panel session of the engagement, “the panelists, in their different submissions, agreed that everyone needed to be on the same page to identify plastic pollution as a crisis and stand up to fight the menace.”

They said all the stakeholders should collaborate to ensure the localisation of the National Policy against the single use of plastics and effective management of plastic wastes.

The News Agency of Nigeria, NAN, recallls that the Federal Ministry of Environment on Jan. 13 resolved to discontinue the use of single-use plastics at its headquarters and its agencies to drive a culture of waste reduction.

NAN/Shakirat Sadiq