On October 23, students and schools in Accra are expected to be recognized for something that deserves more attention in Ghana’s education conversation: turning plastic waste from an environmental problem into an opportunity for action.
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s Institute of Industrial Research, in partnership, scheduled its 2026 Schools Plastic Recovery Project Awards at Odorgonno Senior High School. Participating institutions include Accra High School, O’Reilly Senior High School, Forces Senior High Technical School, Odorgonno SHS and St. John’s Grammar SHS. The initiative rewards schools and students for plastic recovery and environmental stewardship and, importantly, seeks to move environmental education from simply discussing waste to asking how value can be recovered from it.
That is more than an environmental campaign.
It points to an educational opportunity Ghana should take seriously.
Across the country, students encounter environmental problems before they ever enter a science laboratory.
They see plastic sachets and bottles in drains. They see discarded phones, chargers, televisions, batteries and electrical appliances. They encounter flooding worsened by blocked drainage systems, piles of waste around communities and growing concern over what happens to yesterday’s technology when tomorrow’s devices arrive.
What if these familiar problems became part of how students learn mathematics, science, engineering and technology?
What if the plastic bottle beside the school compound was not only something to collect, but also something to count, measure, classify, model and redesign?
What if electronic waste was not discussed only during environmental campaigns but used, safely, as a context for understanding materials, electricity, data, engineering design and the circular economy?
Ghana has an opportunity to make STEM education more meaningful by connecting what students learn in school with problems they can see outside the classroom.
The environmental problems are already around our students
The scale of Ghana’s waste challenge makes this more than a hypothetical classroom exercise.
A World Bank assessment reports that Ghana generates more than 3,000 tonnes of plastic waste each day, or roughly 1.1 million tonnes annually. More recent World Bank analysis, drawing on Ghana’s National Plastic Action Partnership data, indicates that less than half of plastic waste is collected and only a relatively small proportion is recycled.
Electronic waste presents another rapidly growing challenge.
According to Ghana’s 2024 National E-Waste Inventory Report, cited by the Environmental Protection Agency, the country generated about 650,000 tonnes of e-waste in 2023, equivalent to 19.24 kilograms per person and nearly four times the estimated level recorded in 2009. Ghana has since expanded efforts to improve formal collection, refurbishment and recycling.
These numbers are alarming environmentally.
But educationally, they also raise questions that students can investigate.
Where does all this waste come from?
How quickly is it increasing?
What percentage is recovered?
What happens to plastic after it is discarded?
Why are some materials easier to recycle than others?
What economic value is lost when potentially reusable materials are simply dumped?
How could a community redesign its waste-collection system?
Those are environmental questions.
They are also mathematics, science, engineering, economics and technology questions.
Ghana’s curriculum already provides the foundation
Using local environmental challenges for STEM learning would not require abandoning Ghana’s curriculum.
It would help fulfil it.
The current secondary curriculum emphasises critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity, collaboration, communication, scientific literacy and digital literacy. NaCCA describes STEM as something intended to permeate learning areas rather than remain disconnected in individual subject silos.
Ghana’s new engineering curriculum goes even further. It emphasises practical engineering thinking and the development of solutions to societal problems using available resources, while recognising that science and mathematics have too often been studied separately from their applications.
Environmental sustainability provides exactly the kind of context in which those ambitions can become real.
Students do not have to ask, “When will I ever use this?”
The problem is already outside the school gate.
Mathematics can begin with the waste students see
Consider a simple school plastic audit.
For one week, students could record the number and mass of plastic bottles, sachets, food containers and other plastic items collected at designated points around the school.
That information immediately creates mathematics.
Students can calculate totals, percentages and ratios.
They can construct tables and graphs.
They can compare daily waste generation.
They can calculate the percentage of collected material that is recyclable.
Older students can analyse trends, calculate rates of change, develop regression models or estimate how much plastic the school might generate over a term or academic year.
A teacher might ask:
If the school reduces plastic waste by 8 percent each month, what would the waste level look like after six months?
Another class might compare the cost of disposing of waste with potential revenue from properly sorted recyclable materials.
Students could estimate the number of collection bins required for different parts of the school, determine efficient locations, or calculate the transportation cost of moving recovered plastics to a recycling facility.
Suddenly, percentages, statistics, functions, measurement and mathematical modelling are not abstract exercises designed only for examinations.
They become tools for understanding a real problem.
That is the kind of mathematics that can help students recognise that the subject is not merely about producing an answer at the bottom of a page.
Mathematics is also a way of making sense of the world.
Science can explain what happens after we throw something away
Science students can investigate why plastic persists in the environment, how different materials behave, and what happens when waste is burned or improperly discarded.
They can study polymers and material properties.
They can examine decomposition rates.
They can investigate how waste enters waterways and affects ecosystems.
They can explore why some plastics can be recycled more easily than others.
Electronic waste provides equally rich scientific questions.
What materials are found in electronic devices?
Why do batteries require special disposal?
What environmental and health risks can result from unsafe handling?
Why is burning electrical cables to recover metals dangerous?
Students could study conductivity, metals, chemical properties, energy use, and the life cycle of electronic products.
However, there must be an important safety boundary.
Students should not be encouraged to dismantle hazardous electronic waste themselves.
E-waste can contain substances and components that require specialised handling. Ghana is already developing formal systems for collection, dismantling, refurbishment and recycling, including collection and processing centres. School projects should therefore focus on safe collection, research, data analysis, product life cycles and partnerships with trained recyclers rather than exposing students to hazardous materials.
That distinction itself is part of scientific literacy: understanding that solving environmental problems requires both curiosity and responsible practice.
Engineering begins when students are asked to design something better
Environmental problems become especially powerful STEM experiences when students move from analysing a problem to designing a response.
Suppose a school discovers that students often mix plastic bottles with food waste, making recovery difficult.
Instead of teachers simply telling students not to do it, an engineering challenge could be created:
Design a low-cost waste-separation system suitable for our school.
Students would need to identify constraints.
How much space is available?
How much can the school afford?
What materials are locally available?
How can the design make it obvious where different types of waste should go?
How can the containers withstand rain?
How could the system be emptied efficiently?
How will students know whether it is working?
Groups could sketch designs, construct prototypes, test them, collect feedback and improve their solutions.
Another engineering challenge might ask students to design a safe collection point for obsolete phones, chargers or small electronic devices before they are transferred to an authorised recycling system.
The important educational shift is from:
“Plastic pollution is bad.”
to:
“Here is a problem. What can we design, test and improve?”
That is STEM learning.
Computing can help students turn environmental data into information
Technology integration should also go beyond searching Google for information about pollution.
Students can use spreadsheets to analyse waste data.
They can create dashboards showing how much plastic their school collects each week.
They can develop graphs showing changes over time.
They can use coding environments to create simulations of waste accumulation or recycling.
Students could develop a simple digital system to record how much recyclable material different classes or schoolhouses collect.
A computing project might challenge students to design an application interface showing where residents can safely dispose of electronics.
Students with access to geographic tools could map waste hotspots around their communities.
This is where environmental learning, digital literacy and problem-solving begin to reinforce one another.
Technology becomes something students use to investigate and solve problems, rather than something they merely consume.
The school itself can become a STEM laboratory
Ghana does not need every school to build an expensive new laboratory before this kind of learning can begin.
The school environment can provide data.
The community can provide problems.
Partnerships can provide expertise.
The current Schools Plastic Recovery Project demonstrates that schools can already participate in practical environmental action. Its organisers explicitly want to strengthen links between schools and recycling industries.
That model could be expanded.
Schools could partner with district assemblies, universities, CSIR institutes, the Environmental Protection Agency, waste-management companies, recycling businesses, engineering organisations and community groups.
A local recycler could explain the economics of plastic recovery.
An environmental officer could discuss waste regulation.
An engineer could help students evaluate a prototype.
A university STEM department could mentor school projects.
Students could present their findings not only to teachers for marks but to people capable of using their ideas.
That changes the purpose of schoolwork.
The student is no longer completing an assignment that disappears into a teacher’s marking book.
The student is investigating a genuine problem and communicating possible solutions.
Environmental education should move beyond awareness days
Ghanaian schools already participate in clean-up exercises, tree planting and environmental-awareness campaigns.
Those activities are valuable.
But awareness should be the beginning, not the endpoint.
A student may spend Saturday collecting plastic from a school compound and still never be asked on Monday to calculate how much was collected, analyse where it came from or design a strategy for reducing it.
That is a missed educational opportunity.
A clean-up exercise can become a mathematics investigation.
A plastic-recovery campaign can become a statistics project.
A conversation about broken phones can become an electronics and materials lesson.
A polluted drain can become a design challenge.
Environmental action and academic learning do not have to compete for time.
They can strengthen each other.
Teachers will need support, not another burden
For this approach to work, it cannot simply become another instruction sent to already busy teachers.
Teachers need examples of well-designed environmental STEM tasks that align with curriculum objectives.
Professional development should show mathematics, science, computing, and engineering teachers how to approach a common local problem from different disciplinary perspectives.
Assessment must also support this kind of work.
If students are told to think critically, design solutions and investigate real problems but every important assessment rewards only memorisation and routine procedures, teachers will understandably prioritise what examinations measure.
Environmental STEM projects therefore need clear academic expectations.
Students should still demonstrate mathematical accuracy.
They should still understand scientific concepts.
They should still communicate clearly.
They should still justify engineering choices.
Real-world learning should not mean lowering academic standards.
It should mean giving rigorous knowledge somewhere meaningful to operate.
Start locally and scale what works
Not every school needs the same environmental project.
A coastal school may investigate marine plastics.
An Accra school might study urban plastic waste or electronic waste.
A school in a farming community might examine agricultural waste, soil conditions or water use.
Another community might focus on flooding, sanitation, renewable energy or water quality.
The principle is more important than the problem:
Start with an authentic local challenge. Identify the mathematics, science, technology, and engineering embedded within it. Then let students investigate, model, design, test and communicate.
Ghana should pilot such projects, document what works, and gradually develop a bank of locally relevant STEM challenges that teachers can adapt.
The country does not need to import every STEM problem from a foreign textbook.
Ghana already has difficult problems worth solving.
From environmental problems to educational possibilities
Plastic pollution and electronic waste are serious national challenges.
Schools alone cannot solve them.
Students should not be used as cheap labour for waste collection, and classroom projects should never substitute for the responsibilities of government, industry, producers, recyclers and communities.
But schools have a different contribution to make.
They can help young people understand the problems more deeply and, eventually, design better solutions.
The student measuring plastic waste today may become tomorrow’s environmental engineer.
The student analysing recycling data may become a statistician.
The student programming a waste-tracking system may become a software developer.
The student investigating electronic materials may become a scientist.
And even those who pursue entirely different careers can leave school understanding that mathematics and science are tools for responsible citizenship, not simply subjects needed to pass an examination.
The schools being recognised through Ghana’s Plastic Recovery Project offer a glimpse of that possibility.
The next step should be to connect such environmental action much more deliberately to teaching and learning.
When students see plastic blocking a drain, they should certainly recognise an environmental problem.
But perhaps we should also teach them to see a data problem, a chemistry problem, an engineering problem, a mathematical-modeling problem and a design problem.
When they see obsolete electronics accumulating in homes and communities, they should see more than discarded technology.
They should ask what materials are inside, where those materials came from, what risks improper disposal creates, what value can be recovered, and how a circular system could work better.
That is what meaningful STEM education can do.
It teaches students not only to describe the problems around them but to bring knowledge to bear on them.
Ghana does not lack real-world STEM problems.
They are already in our drains, our homes, our school compounds, and our communities.
The opportunity now is to bring them into the classroom - not as problems students merely read about, but as problems they learn to investigate, model, and help solve.
Shadrack Agyapong
Mathematics & STEM Educator | Education Researcher | PhD Student
U.S.-Based Ghanaian Educator
Sources for Editorial Verification
- ModernGhana — CSIR-IIR to honour young environmental champions at plastic recovery awards
Confirms that CSIR-IIR, OmniBSIC Bank and Ocean Tribe scheduled the 2026 Schools Plastic Recovery Project Awards for October 23 at Odorgonno SHS, with Accra High, O’Reilly SHS, Forces Senior High Technical, Odorgonno SHS and St. John’s Grammar participating. It also confirms the project’s focus on plastic recovery, environmental stewardship, and links between schools and recycling industries. Modern Ghana
- World Bank - Ghana plastic-waste data
A recent World Bank analysis reports that Ghana generates more than 3,000 tonnes of plastic waste per day, equivalent to about 1.1 million tonnes annually. It also reports that less than half is collected and about 9.5% is recycled. World Bank
World Bank report on Ghana's environmental and plastic-waste challenges
- Ghana News Agency - National e-waste figures and collection initiative
Citing Ghana’s 2024 National E-Waste Inventory Report, Ghana generated about 650,000 tonnes of e-waste in 2023, or 19.24 kg per person, nearly four times the estimated 2009 level. It also documents plans for formal collection, dismantling and refurbishment centres. Ghana News Agency
- NaCCA - Development of Ghana’s secondary curriculum
Confirms that Ghana’s secondary curriculum is intended to develop 21st-century skills and competencies, is learner-centred, and is designed so that STEM permeates different learning areas. nacca.gov.gh
- NaCCA - Critical thinking and problem-solving competencies
NaCCA identifies critical thinking and problem-solving as core competencies and states that learners should analyse situations, consider possible solutions, persevere and take responsibility for learning. This supports the article’s argument for authentic environmental problem-solving. nacca.gov.gh
- NaCCA - Secondary Mathematics Curriculum
The current mathematics curriculum explicitly includes modelling real-life problems, technology literacy, critical thinking, integrated problem-solving, innovation and creativity. This directly supports the examples in the article involving waste data, percentages, graphs, modelling and digital tools. nacca.gov.gh
- NaCCA - Engineering Curriculum
Ghana’s current engineering curriculum includes engineering in society, engineering design, rapid prototyping, energy systems, automation and embedded systems, providing strong curricular support for using local environmental challenges as design and engineering problems. nacca.gov.gh
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