Rite Foods Limited, through its sponsored riteonthebeach initiative aimed at cleaning the country’s beaches, has cleared 100,000 plastic bottles from Lagos shorelines.
The initiative was launched in August 2021 by Rite Foods’ managing director, Mr. Seleem Adegunwa, as the firm’s Corporate Social Responsibility(CSR) project and went live in the Lagos beach communities in January 2022, with a success story.
To date, the communities have removed over 100,000 bottles from their beaches with school children taking the responsibility of dropping off twenty-two bottles or 1kg of plastics before school each day.
Through the beach cleaning initiative, 74 scholarships and over 20 jobs have been created from the collection and recycling process, spearheaded by the founder of Popbeachclub, Mr. Akin Disu, the convener of Riteonthebeach, with its festival held in November, 2022.
The academic festival sensitises the public on the effects of climate change and plastic pollution on the environment centred in the remote Lagos fishing communities of Ilashe, Ibeshe, and Ikaare.
In partnership with Disu, Riteonthebeach created the Plastic Neutral Token, a community-driven social enterprise system that encourages members of the public to take responsibility for the plastic waste they produce, as the average human being uses 84 kilograms of plastic yearly.
As members of the public buying a plastic-neutral token, the scheme will remove 84kgs of plastic from the ocean, thereby making it plastic-neutral and eco-friendly.
