Jeff Provencal: “Everyone eats plastic nowadays”

“Today, you see all these health trends about moringa and other superfoods. Why would you care about any of that if you’re ingesting plastic that is made out of oil? Crude oil”, Jeff Provencal says while walking on his plastic recycling site in Tema, “you’re literally eating oil,” he added.

The plastic waste recycling company Repatrn buys plastic bottles from collectors Jamila Meischke

According to the founder of the recycling company, every time we consume anything out of plastic, it is likely to end up in our food chain. Studies say that 80% of the plastic ever created is still on our planet somewhere because it takes 400 years to decompose. "Just walk around and you’d see that the goats and chickens are eating plastic. And people eat meat and eggs. If any of that is local, then you’re 100% eating plastic.”

Provencal, who was born in Switzerland to Ghanaian parents, says no one was looking at PET - plastic bottles - when he started his company. “Switzerland has a history of recycling. I took that with the lack of it in Ghana and tried to see if I could bridge the gap between the demand of the product abroad and the availability of the material.”

Employees sift the plastic flakes manually at the recycling landfill in Tema. Jamila Meischke

Plastic is too convenient

“The crazy thing about plastic is that it is way too convenient. It is super light, it is durable, it increases the shelf life of a lot of products, it can move things around very easily and it does not break. But that is completely ignoring the environmental costs that it has”, says the entrepreneur. “We created something too good for our own sake. And if you care at all about what you put in your body, you have to at least think about it.”

But at the base level, Provencal creates employment opportunities for the poorest people in society. The plastic collectors who work on the dumps are responsible for their own health care and pension. “We hope to partially formalize the informal sector. Those people are going to pay taxes. Which eventually will grow our economy.”

The bottles have to be sorted by colour in order to process them Jamila Meischke

Making money from trash

However, the recycling business is not easy. “While we’re literally trying to make money from waste and saving the government a lot of money to get rid of it, the Ghanaian government does not subsidize recycling industries. So, we only do a very small part here. We buy from collectors and crush into flakes, but don’t wash, decontaminate and repelletize because the bottle-to-bottle recycling plant costs around 85 million GHC”, he says. "Once we’re able to source 4,000 tonnes of PET bottles a year we will be able to justify that investment."

Provencal thinks that people can get behind it if they see the cool things you can make from PET and understand that it is a resource and not waste. “I don’t think plastic is bad necessarily”, he adds. "I think the design is flawed because it does not take into consideration what happens after its use. If a sportswear brand would create a shoe or clothing made of waste plastic collected from the beaches of Ghana, that might be something people would want to have. I think consumerism might be the driving force for getting the issue in check, rather than environmentalism. I think so, unfortunately. But either way, we do it.”