Ghana will recycle all of its wastes to generate energy and other useful products to save the environment and also generate revenue, Minister Nominee for Environment, Innovation, Science and Technology, Professor Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng, has said.
According to the renowned Heart Surgeon, every form of waste is another raw material to generate energy and other useful things that will benefit the country immensely.
Professor Frimpong-Boateng said this when he appeared before members of Parliament’s Appointments Committee during his vetting.
Prof. Frimpong-Boateng listed a number of waste products from worn-out car tyres, sawdust, dirty oil, and other forms of urban waste, to create a lot of useful things that will benefit the country in saving the environment and generating revenue.
“There are a lot of wastes; I will start with lorry tyres which are everywhere. We will intend to do a recycling to convert them into fuel; we have dirty engine oil which is thrown into gutters. The oil itself doesn’t change although it is dirty; so the technology will be to remove those additives and impurities and then we can still make money from it and save our environment.”
“We also want to recycle hard plastics which can be used again or to produce energy. We want to do E-waste or electronic waste management which is also possible and many other things apart from generating power, building biogas plants from faecal waste and so on. So we have a lot of things that we have lined up, and we will be contacting you the MPs in your various constituencies on some of the projects in terms of energy. For example, in areas where you grow maize, when you have harvested the dry maize, keep the stock and whatever is left us; we can prepare breakers from those things. If you have harvested groundnut, leave the husks for us, we will turn them into activated carbon and so on. If you have sawdust; leave it for us, and don’t fill it in the river and spoil the sawdust. We will need bamboo to produce wood gas that can be used to power plants” he noted.
The nominee also said going forward there would be no need for Ghana to have landfill sites, to keep waste which is often burnt, instead of being recycled.
“I don’t think there should be any landfill sites because these things that we call waste are raw material that we need to produce either energy, compost or something else. So we want to come to a point like Sweden, where they want to import waste from other countries so that they can process. So we have to do away with these landfill sites and its attendant problems.”
Ghana spends several millions of cedis in its attempt to manage waste effectively, but has achieved very little over the years.
Several parts of the country are still engulfed in filth, despite the introduction of the National Sanitation Day.
Landfill sites are a source of conflict between city authorities and residents in the communities they are located. Residents of Oblogo, Achimota, and other towns across the country complain about the stench and diseases caused by the landfill sites.
In some places, city authorities have been forced to shut down sites due to protests from residents.
Prof. Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng is a trained physician and cardiothoracic surgeon who established the National Cardiothoracic Center and the Ghana Red Cross Society.
He is also the President of the Ghana Heart Foundation and was once the Chief Executive Officer of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra.
In March 2006, he announced his intention to contest the New Patriotic Party presidential primaries for the December 2008 National Presidential Elections.
He however lost in his attempt against now President-elect, Nana Akuffo-Addo, who had subsequently lost the 2008 elections to the National Democratic Congress’ (NDC), John Evans Atta-Mills. Prof. Frimpong-Boateng is married with five children, and he’s very passionate about science and technology, which remains pivotal to any country’s development.
By: Ebenezer Afanyi Dadzie/citifmonline.com/Ghana
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