The Minister for Environment, Science and Technology, Dr Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings, says banning Styrofoam takeaway packs alone will not put an end to Ghana’s plastic problem.
She has therefore asked scientists to look at alternatives the country can use to help address it.
She said this at the National Scientific Conference of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) on Wednesday, October 14, 2026, ahead of the government’s plans to ban Styrofoam in January 2027.
“Styrofoam ban on its own will not deal with the plastic menace, it will not deal with the microplastics in our food chain, it will not deal with the exposure to toxic chemicals that leach into our water because it’s so hot and we keep our plastic bottles everywhere in the heat and we then drink these bottles of water that now have chemicals that have leached into them and then the impact on our kidneys and our various organs,” she said.
She added that the health consequences could extend to hospitals, warning that people might be encouraged to drink more water without considering whether chemicals leaching from plastic containers had contaminated it.
The minister urged scientists to look to plants for replacements.
“What are the alternatives to plastics that we can use? Plant-based, all right, whether it’s cassava or hemp. And I’m throwing this out there because by the 7th of January, we’re banning Styrofoam, but that’s just the first step in a whole journey of how we change our way of life as a people,” she said.
She called on the scientists to think boldly about the problem.
“We need to come up with solutions, we need to be disruptive in our thinking, let’s reinvent the wheel literally. There are things that have not been thought of yet and there are things that we can actually perhaps modify to suit our own purposes,” she said.
She described what success would look like.
“If we come up with a substance that looks like plastic, behaves like plastic and can hold whatever is in it, but once you have consumed what is in it, it breaks down into a harmless residue of some plant product which can then go back to nature, then I think we’re really making a difference,” she said.
