General Manager of the Accra Waste Recovery Park, Betty Brown has called on the government for financial support to enhance the operational life of the waste management facility.
The integrated recycling and compost plant helps in recovering waste materials to produce compost.
Addressing Members of Parliament, who paid a visit to the site, Betty Brown said the inability of the facility to function effectively due to operational cost will mean a return of the country to its primitive waste management procedure.
“It is a social interventionist approach to waste management and the public good. And because it is a public good it makes it very expensive for any private player who has invested in such a high commercial demanded enterprise to make any financial gains after he has invested in such a facility and so we are saying that the operational cost of this place alone is so much as well as overhead and all that.”
He called on the government to support the enterprise which will affect the charge for each waste brought to the facility.
We will need the government to intervene so that when these tricycle operators come because we cannot charge them fair market price. World bank benchmark is about USD 35 per tonne. We are doing less than that and it should tell you that we are getting nothing from this entreprise that we have created.”
Meanwhile Head of Process Engineering at the Ghana Sewage Limited, Eric Amofa also cautioned the public to desist from dumping foreign material in sewage systems.
“We are supposed to treat liquid waste not solid waste but we receive lots of solid waste like the aborted babies, phones, wallets, slippers, sand among others. It is really affecting our operations like our pumps and the rest. So I advice the public that those who use to or who are in the habit of putting those rubbish debris into their septic tanks into the public toilets, they should put an end to that. Every month we pay about 20,000 cedis to dispose it off.”