Environmentalist calls for passage of National Waste Management Tax Bill

An environmentalist on Monday called for a quick passage of the National Waste Management Tax Bill into an Act to effectively deal with waste in a more proactive manner to save the ecology.

Captain Frederick Amoh-Twum (Rtd), Project Co-ordinator of Environmental Services Providers Association (ESPA), who made the call, said the Bill, when passed, would use the theory of Polluter Pays Principle (PPP) as a means to forestall total depletion of the environment.

He was speaking to the Ghana News Agency in an interview in Accra at the end of a four-day advocacy workshop sponsored by the Business Sector Advocacy Challenge (BUSAC) Fund for members of ESPA at the weekend at Dodowa in the Eastern Region.

The workshop supported by the Society for Managing Initiatives and Leadership Enhancement (SMILE) Ghana, a private firm, was to equip members of the association to effectively engage government for the socio-economic importance of the proposed Bill.

Captain Amoh-Twum, who is also the Executive Director of Falcon Company Limited, a private waste management company, expressed worry that the manufacturing industry is the worst polluters of the environment, stressing the need to make them accountable for their actions.

He said developed countries applied the PPP to ensure a clean environment for posterity, adding that Ghana needs to emulate their example to monitor activities at the manufacturing sector.

The PPP is an environmental policy principle which requires that the costs of pollution be borne by those who caused it.

In its original emergence, the PPP aims at determining how the costs of pollution prevention and control must be allocated and to internalise the environmental externalities of economic activities so that the prices of goods and services fully reflect the cost of production.

Captain Amoh-Twum expressed the hope that the workshop had equipped the members to effectively lobby for the passage of the proposed Bill.

Mr Paul Oduro Frimpong, Executive Director of SMILE, Ghana told the GNA that advocacy as a skill is critical in effectively engaging parliamentarians to make them understand the value of the Bill.

He said advocacy aimed at influencing public-policy and resource allocation decisions within political, economic, and social systems and institutions, adding the skills could be motivated from moral, ethical or faith principles or simply to protect an asset of interest.

Mr Frimpong lauded BUSAC Funds for supporting the workshop, stressing that it was high time the environment was protected in the wake of global calls on pragmatic measures to mitigate effects of Climate Change and other activities that polluted the environment.

He said the cost of environmental degradation is expensive adding, timely preventive measures are less expensive than curative.**