EPA releases Akoben Rating for manufacturing companies

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has given an ultimatum to all manufacturing companies operating without adherence to environmental regulations to regularizes their activities by the end of November or face stiffer sanctions.

Mr Daniel Amlalo, Executive Director of EPA, who announced this on Friday in Accra, said companies who continuously underperform under the “Akoben” Environmental Performance Rating and Public Disclosure initiative should as a matter of urgency, collaborate with officials of the National Cleaner Production Centre for assistance to help them regularize their activities.

Speaking at a ceremony to release the EPA’s Akoben Performance Rating for the manufacturing industry, Mr Amlalo said the 2012 rating involved 100 companies instead of the 50 companies that were initially involved in the rating in 2009.

Under the Akoben initiative, the environmental performance of mining and manufacturing operations is assessed under a five-colour rating scheme.

The colours are: Gold, which stands for excellent performance; Green for very good performance; Blue for good; Orange for satisfactory; and Red for poor performance.

Mr Amlalo said out of the 100 companies, two companies: Diamond Cement Limited at Aflao in the Volta Region and Ghana Rubber Products Limited in Accra had Green rating, signifying “very good performance”.

Thirty companies had the Orange ratings; seven had Blue whilst the rest had Red ratings.

Mr Amlalo said many more companies had the Orange ratings, which signified general efforts being made by most firms to operate within acceptable environmental standards.

He said companies that consistently recorded Red ratings over the years needed to be assisted to be able to improve upon their operations.

He announced that in 2013 the number of manufacturing companies to be featured under the Akoben rating would be increased to 150 while the Oil marketing companies as well as hospitality industry would be brought on board to ensure that all companies operated within the environmental laws.

“We are doing all these to protect the environment for generations”, he said.

Findings revealed that most of the companies were fulfilling their obligations towards the society in the form of corporate social responsibilities with almost all of them gaining the Gold rating.

However, he said, many of the companies had Red rating in connection with legal issues, hazardous waste management, non-toxic releases and for environmental monitoring and reporting.

Mr Lambert Faabeluon, Director, Manufacturing Industry Department of EPA, said Akoben ratings for the manufacturing sector started in 2009 for annual disclosure to the public and the media as a way of motivating companies to follow environmental regulations.

He said under the system, monthly, quarterly and annual data are received from companies by EPA, which also gather information from communities and the media about environmental issues and later do site audits and inspections of participating companies.

He urged manufacturing companies to endeavour to attain zero tolerance for toxic waste releases into the environment by putting up measures to properly manage their toxics.

The Akoben system is a regulatory management tool that would help bring sanity in the industry’s operations. It also involved hard data, analytical results and visual evidence of activities and performances of companies which were also devoid of biases.

Most of the participating companies expressed misgivings about the rating and said measures should be put in place to make it a bit easy for companies to gradually comply with all the requirements.