From The Customer-centric Entrepreneur Project
In the pre-dawn darkness of Accra’s Agbogbloshie market, dozens of waste pickers begin their daily routine—sifting through refuse, collecting plastic bottles, and navigating the informal economy that provides their survival.
Their work is essential yet invisible, dignified yet unrecognised, valuable yet undercompensated. Across Ghana, thousands of people earn their livelihoods from waste, operating in conditions that offer neither security nor respect. But this reality is poised to change.
Ghana’s emerging recycled PET (rPET) industry represents more than an environmental solution or an economic opportunity—it is fundamentally a jobs revolution.
The establishment of commercial-scale recycling facilities, including the transformative Mohinani rPET Project, could create approximately 3,000 jobs across the waste-to-value chain, fundamentally reshaping livelihoods for some of Ghana’s most vulnerable workers while building a new sector of formal employment for skilled professionals.
The promise is extraordinary: transforming landfills into livelihoods, waste pickers into entrepreneurs, and environmental liability into economic asset. Understanding how this transformation unfolds requires examining the full spectrum of employment opportunities that rPET recycling generates—from collection to processing, from transportation to quality control, from administration to innovation.
Direct Employment: The Core Workforce
At the heart of the rPET industry lies the processing facility itself—the technological centre where discarded bottles are transformed into valuable raw material. A commercial-scale rPET plant processing 18,000 tonnes of post-consumer PET bottles annually creates between 150 and 200 direct jobs, representing formal sector employment with regular wages, employment contracts, and social security benefits.
These are not menial positions but skilled and semi-skilled roles spanning multiple disciplines. Plant operators manage sophisticated sorting and processing equipment, ensuring consistent quality and operational efficiency. Quality control technicians conduct rigorous testing to ensure recycled resin meets food-grade standards required by beverage manufacturers.
Maintenance engineers ensure that complex machinery operates optimally, minimising downtime and maximising productivity. Laboratory staff analyse material properties, contamination levels, and product specifications. Administrative personnel manage logistics, procurement, human resources, and financial operations.
For Ghana’s workforce, these represent quality jobs—positions that offer career progression, skills development, and economic security. The wages earned by these workers support families, fund children’s education, and contribute to community development. Moreover, these jobs contribute to formal tax systems, paying into PAYE income tax and social security contributions, thereby supporting national development.
The Mohinani rPET Project exemplifies this employment creation potential. By establishing state-of-the-art recycling infrastructure, the initiative demonstrates how private sector investment in green industries can generate substantial formal employment while addressing environmental challenges. Each job created in the processing facility represents a family lifted toward economic security and a contribution to Ghana’s broader development objectives.
Indirect Employment: The Extended Value Chain
While direct facility employment is significant, the true jobs revolution occurs across the extended value chain. The 3,000-job projection for Ghana’s rPET industry encompasses the entire ecosystem of collection, aggregation, sorting, transportation, and support services that enable recycling operations. These indirect employment opportunities represent the industry’s transformative potential for inclusive economic development.
Collection Networks: Organising the Grassroots
The foundation of any recycling industry is effective collection—gathering post-consumer bottles from households, businesses, institutions, and public spaces. In Ghana, this collection currently happens informally through waste pickers who recover valuable materials from mixed waste streams. The formalisation and expansion of this collection network could engage between 2,000 and 2,500 people in structured collection activities.
Unlike the current informal system, organised collection networks linked to rPET facilities offer waste collectors stable purchasing arrangements, predictable income streams, and safer working conditions. Collection agents become recognised suppliers with business relationships rather than marginalised scavengers operating at society’s edges. This transition from informality to formality represents dignity as much as economic improvement.
Moreover, an organised collection creates opportunities for entrepreneurship. Collection agents can establish micro-enterprises, employing helpers and operating across defined territories. Aggregation point operators can build small businesses buying from multiple collectors and selling in bulk to recycling facilities. These micro and small enterprises become engines of local economic development, circulating income within communities and building wealth at the grassroots level.
Transportation and Logistics: Moving Materials Efficiently
The 18,000 tonnes of PET bottles required annually by a commercial-scale facility must move from collection points through aggregation hubs to processing facilities. This logistical challenge creates substantial employment in transportation services. Truck drivers, logistics coordinators, warehouse operators, and loading crews all find employment in moving materials through the recycling value chain.
For Ghana’s transport sector, this represents consistent demand and stable contracts. Transportation companies can invest in specialised vehicles and infrastructure knowing they have reliable customers. Independent owner-operators can secure regular routes. The predictable demand created by established recycling operations stabilises incomes for transport workers and supports investment in fleet expansion and improvement.
Sorting and Pre-Processing: Adding Value before the Factory
Before bottles reach the main processing facility, they require initial sorting and preparation. Bottles must be separated by colour, caps and labels removed, contaminated materials excluded. This labour-intensive pre-processing creates significant employment in sorting operations, typically conducted at aggregation hubs throughout the collection network.
Sorting jobs are accessible to workers with limited formal education, providing entry points into the formal economy for marginalised populations. These positions offer regular wages, predictable schedules, and safer working environments than informal waste picking. They represent stepping stones toward economic inclusion for vulnerable communities, particularly women and youth who often face barriers to formal employment.
Support Services: The Enabling Infrastructure
Beyond the core collection and processing activities, rPET operations generate demand across numerous support services. Security companies provide facility protection. Cleaning services maintain operational hygiene. Equipment maintenance contractors service specialised machinery. Financial institutions provide banking and payment services. Professional consultancies offer technical, legal, and business advisory services. IT providers supply technology infrastructure and support.
Each of these support service contracts represents additional employment—jobs that may not be directly counted as “recycling industry” positions but that exist because the recycling industry exists. This is the essence of the economic multiplier effect: one industry’s operations create demand that sustains employment across the broader economy.
Formalising the Informal Sector: Transformation with Dignity
Perhaps the most profound impact of Ghana’s rPET industry development is its potential to formalise the country’s extensive informal waste sector. Current estimates suggest Ghana’s informal waste economy engages tens of thousands of people, operating with minimal regulation, inconsistent incomes, and virtually no social protection.
The establishment of organised rPET collection networks offers a pathway to formalisation that respects the existing workforce while improving their conditions. Rather than displacing informal waste pickers, structured recycling systems can integrate them into formal supply chains with better compensation and working conditions.
This formalisation process is already beginning through initiatives like the Mohinani rPET Project, which is developing collection networks that provide waste collectors with consistent purchasing arrangements and fair prices for recovered materials. The model demonstrates that formalisation need not mean replacement—it can mean recognition, respect, and improved livelihoods for those who have always performed this essential work.
The economic impact is substantial: injecting between GHS 27 million and GHS 36 million annually into the informal waste sector. For individual collectors, this means moving from sporadic earnings of perhaps GHS 10-20 per day to more consistent incomes of GHS 30-50 per day through organised supply relationships. These income increases represent transformative change for families living on the margins of economic security.
Skills Development and Capacity Building
The rPET industry also creates opportunities for skills development and vocational training. Processing facility operations require technical skills in machinery operation, quality control, laboratory analysis, and maintenance. Collection networks benefit from business skills training, basic accounting, and customer service capabilities. Sorting operations improve through training in material identification and contamination detection.
These skill development opportunities have value beyond immediate employment. Workers trained in recycling operations carry transferable skills applicable across manufacturing sectors. Entrepreneurs developed through collection networks can apply business capabilities to other ventures. The human capital development stimulated by the rPET industry contributes to Ghana’s broader economic development beyond the recycling sector itself.
Special Focus: Women and Youth Employment
Ghana’s rPET industry holds particular promise for women and youth—populations that face disproportionate barriers to formal employment. Sorting operations, collection coordination, and administrative roles offer accessible entry points for women seeking formal employment. Youth can find first jobs in collection, transportation, and facility operations, building work experience and career foundations.
The Mohinani rPET Project recognises this potential, explicitly targeting vulnerable communities and marginalised workers in its employment strategy. By prioritising inclusive hiring and supporting skills development for disadvantaged populations, the initiative demonstrates how green industries can advance both environmental and social equity objectives simultaneously.
Conclusion: Employment as Environmental Strategy
The 3,000 jobs created through Ghana’s rPET industry represent more than economic statistics—they represent families supported, communities strengthened, and lives transformed. From the waste picker gaining dignity and security through formalised collection networks to the chemical engineer managing quality control in a state-of-the-art processing facility, these employment opportunities span the economic spectrum and touch lives across Ghanaian society.
The transition from landfills to livelihoods is underway. With continued investment in recycling infrastructure, supportive policy frameworks, and initiatives like the Mohinani rPET Project leading the way, Ghana can build a recycling industry that proves environmental sustainability and inclusive economic development are not competing objectives but complementary strategies. The 900 million bottles Ghana discards annually represent not just waste to be managed but livelihoods to be created—3,000 of them, transforming both the environment and the economy, one job at a time.
