‘Solve waste, sanitation problems with compost plants’

The Government must consider using industrial scale compost plants across the country as a means to address the challenges of waste and sanitation.

Bob Offei Manteaw, Director of Research, Innovation and Development at the Africa Institute of Sanitation and Waste Management, has advised.

In an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA), he said such a move would go a long way to add value to the waste generated as well as help to reduce the amount of waste that create insanitary conditions in the country.

He noted that the current practice of collecting and dumping of waste was outmoded and wasteful, as there were tremendous emergent opportunities for value addition and wealth creation in modern waste management practices.

He suggested: “The country should embrace modern approaches and technologies that promote recycling, material recovery and waste reduction.

“Waste should not be seen as useless or just waste, it should be seen as a secondary material which could be re-used to produce other useful things for society”.

Dr Manteaw urged the government to urgently consider working with the private sector to build modern compost facilities in every region and district and use these as avenues to reduce the amount of waste that burdens the country’s landfill and dump sites.

He said urban and peri-urban communities were currently struggling to identify suitable places to use as landfills or dumpsites, saying that is a key challenge in urban waste management.

“Accra and Tema, and some of our larger cities, in particular, face significant land shortage for human habitation and that has made it extremely difficult to identify and acquire appropriate land to use as waste disposal sites,” he explained.

He said the emphasis should shift from landfills or dumpsites to the creation of composting and other recycling facilities that could take waste for productive ventures.

The Research Director noted that Ghana largely depended on Agriculture and subsistence farming as key livelihood sources and should, therefore, take advantage of the abundance of organic waste in communities to produce organic fertilizers to support both large and small scale farming.

Dr Manteaw said Ghana currently had only one modern composting plant at the Accra Compost and Recycling Plant (ACARP), which was privately owned, saying it had tremendous potential to transform both large and small scale farming.

He observed that organic compost from the Plant is unable to compete with imported fertilizers, not because organic compost made in Ghana is inferior, but mainly because of a certain mindset that undervalues home-made organic composting in agriculture.

“Just like our insatiable taste for everything foreign, including toothpicks, farmers have also developed a special appetite for imported fertilizers,” he said. “It is a worrying trend that can only change with policy and sensitization”.

Dr Manteaw said apart from the agricultural benefits that could be derived from waste composting plants, it could also help in reducing the amount of filth in homes and public spaces.

He said the need to build compost plants in Ghana was not for the development of organic compost alone, but largely for value addition to waste which would involve material recovery and re-use.