160 Recycling Plants To Rescue Ghana From Solid Waste

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waste managementACCRA, April 8 (Xinhua) — Zoomlion Ghana, the largest partner of the government in solid waste management, said here Thursday 160 recycle plants would be installed across the country as from June.

 

Joseph Siaw Agyepong, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Zoomlion Ghana, supported by Zoomlion China, disclosed this during an interaction with major stakeholders in Ghana?s environmental sanitation.

 

He said a plant would be mounted in each district across the country to implement a trash-to-cash concept where people would have their waste weighed and paid for at the plant site in a bid to deal with the large volumes of solid waste threatening the country.

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?This will give farmers, market women, and people from all walks of life the motivation to hand in their waste instead of dropping them in the streets and into drains,? Agyepong said.

 

He said about 2 million cedis or 1.05 million U.S. Dollars would be the initial capital invested in the purchase and installation of the plants.

 

Late 2012, government, in partnership with Zoomlion Ghana, began putting into use the waste recycling and compost plant located at Adjin-Kotoku, about 15 km north-west of the capital.

 

The plant, built with a wholly Chinese technology, has the capacity to compost 3,000 tons of waste in a day when operating at peak capacity.

 

The same technology is to be replicated in two other cities of Takoradi, 218 km west of the capital, and Kumasi, 270 km north of the capital.

 

The CEO said granules were already being exported from this plant to China and Malaysia, but explained that ?the raw granules and the recycled waste from the yet-to-be installed plants would be put together to produce waste bins to be distributed freely to the public?.

 

?These waste bins would be placed in vehicles, lorry parks, offices and major locations in towns and cities for waste disposal,? Agyepong promised.

 

He said if this initiative proved successful, government would then be convinced to introduce an environmental tax for petro-chemical industries and other industrial concerns.

 

?Although environmental sanitation is not part of the definitions of sanitation under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the country needs to work hard to deal with the waste it generates,? Naa Demedeme Lenason, Director, Environmental Health and Safety Unit, told Xinhua via telephone.

 

Ghana, with a population of 24.4 million, generates 13,000 tons of waste daily, but lacks waste management infrastructure, he added.

 

Lenason however believed that high capacity recycling plants should be installed in every municipality in a pilot program to measure how much of the total volume of waste could be eradicated through the plants.

 

?They should be under the Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) to measure their efficiency before these are replicated across the country,? the director urged.

 

Ghana?s Local Government Act (Act 462) and the Environmental Sanitation Policy (1999) make the management of municipal solid waste the responsibility of local authorities, specifically their waste management and environmental health departments and the private sector.?Enditem.

Source: Justice Lee Adoboe

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