Residents at Kpone in the Kpone-Katamanso Municipal of the Tema Region have raised serious concerns about the way the Kpone Landfill poses serious threat to their lives at the moment.
Mr.
Kofi Okrah a resident of the area in an interview complained of
intermittent but overwhelming fire outbreaks on the landfill since the
coming into operation of a Chinese ceramic company which uses fire to
harden their products about a year now. He said the fire has brought
about pungent smoke for several weeks making it difficult for residents
to breath.
Mr. Okrah said many of the residents including him have
contracted throat disease which has made it impossible for them to feel
the taste of any food they eat lately and fear it may escalate.
Managers
of the landfill have said the lateral space of the landfill has been
exhausted while the air space has reached alarming levels of over 30
meters high.
According to them, the engineered landfill which
begun operation in 2013 has not experienced the current kind of fire
outbreaks and corroborated the claim that the fires could be the
sparkles of fire from the ceramic factory which operates just by the
landfill at night though unsubstantiated.
The landfill which was
meant to receive 500 cubic tons of waste in a day eventually receives in
excess of 1,500 and runs 24 hours in a day since all or most of the
waste in Accra was now brought to this landfill site until the
installation of IRECOP.
They alluded to the fact that since
Zoomlion opened the Integrated Compost and Recycling Plant (IRECOP) near
the Korle Bu Mortuary, the number of trucks trooping into the landfill
reduced drastically especially that they find it difficult to dump at
the already choked landfill at Kpone.
It is therefore deduced that
landfilling is no longer appropriate compared to the IRECOP which is
able to reduce the waste drastically by using all the organic waste for
compost for the agrarian population and recycle the plastics for reuse
etc.
Research has established that 61% of waste generated in Ghana
is organic and 14% plastic which are all processed at IRECOP with paper
and textiles which is 5% and 2% respectively bringing the total to 82%.
IRECOP receives between 280 to 360 tons of municipal solid waste a day
meaning a chunk of the waste generated in the cities could be taken care
of if we have IRECOP situated at vantage places.
The IRECOP
system which does not need so much land to operate and the waste is
reduced to a tolerable minimum must be encouraged. By estimation, one
can get only one track out of 20 trucks after the sorting and recycling
is done at IRECOP. Question is why our leaders will not adopt the IRECOP
plants since there is no land for these landfill purposes today.
Looking
around, the area has fast advanced in terms of development and the
managers believe with this kind of development coupled with the size and
height of the heap the landfill has no place here.
Research again
has revealed that the longest serving landfill site in Ghana has been
Mallam Dumpsite (1991-2001), the rest have survived barely for less than
five years meaning landfilling is not sustainable compared with IRECOP.
