Need to segregate our waste
Generating waste is part of what living things do as they interact by depending on each other. Animals make good use of plants waste in the form of oxygen.
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Though carbon dioxide is a byproduct of animals, the plants need that as their raw material to make food. This gives all aspects of life comparative importance. And all the things needed to make life comfortable abound. The human body has an amazing workforce that makes getting rid of waste go hand in hand with building or repairing the body itself.
The National Waste Segregation Programme was launched by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in November 2013. The Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development earlier on initiated the “Waste to Cash” project in 2012. The Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) findings show that Ghana’s GH¢1.2 billion waste revenue is lost annually because we do not recycle. What the whole nation recycles is less than five per cent.
In anticipation of replicating waste segregation at source in our homes, churches, markets, hospitals, waste segregation should be encouraged in basic schools. Even crude oil has a crude value but refined oil has a refined and higher value.
How does your waste leave your compound?
When a doctor leaves an instrument in his patient’s stomach, we want to sue him. When the President got a new name at Ghana’s 59th Independence, we considered it as a national disgrace by our judgements, but we see nothing wrong mixing things that will burn with those that will rot. We go to the extent of adding broken glass to banana peels, sanitary pads, perfume cans, forgetting that it takes so long for some plastics to decay.
It makes economic sense and it is profitable to separate waste at source. The same heart pumping blood to support life does so also to clean the waste generated concurrently. The advocating tool for effective utilisation of separated waste as raw material to feed another industry should stem from categorising it into distinctive subgroups: 1-Waste Generators, 2-Waste Collectors, 3- Waste Transporters, 4-Waste Treatment Experts and 5-Waste Reusers.
Ghana does not have a State /National cocoa farm but subsistence farmers are supporting us by their daily efforts. The collective effort of each farmer brings money into the national coffers for Ghana. Greater Accra has a diminishing commercial landfill in Tema.
Categorising waste
Sweden imports waste to generate electricity but in Ghana, the collection and dumping of waste without sorting takes money from us because even though money is paid to contractors to cart them, the final disposal causes a nuisance. We can separate our waste into three components: those to burn, those to allow to rot and the ones for recycling. Advanced nations are no longer building landfill sites. Accra itself has no landfills but pockets of refuse dumps considered as authorised sites, which contravene EPA’s compliance.
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Broken bottles could be turned into beads with appropriate technology. This will turn the word “Waste” into “Wealth Accumulated, Saving the Environment.” With discipline, let us make Ghana beautiful like Holland and clean like Rwanda, and use the waste composted to plant trees and green our environment. Our overindulgence in the act of littering acquired by experience, performed regularly and automatically as if it is influenced by a reward, leaves much to be desired.
The application of tools and methods, mechanics and equipment to turn our misfortunes into opportunity and technology transfer to make up for what we lack - the skills and ability to transform our waste - is what we need. Like a ball thrown at a wall, whatever we throw away, be it liquid, solid or gas will surely come to us in another form.
As humans, and to be alive, one will have to excrete or get rid of unwanted substances and wherever we live, be it in the slums or well-structured buildings, one thing is common; over time all these will come back either clean or diseased: the used menstrual pad, T-roll, empty cans, broken bottles, banana peels wrapped in polythene, metal scraps, used condoms, baby and adult diapers, used water sachet , sweat, tears, spittle and sputum, bath water running in the gutters, urine and toilets.
They are all nature’s signatures of a past activity. They do not just disappear, since matter cannot be destroyed but will exist in another form. But mixing all together before discarding it is crude. Sanitation has good benefits but lacks glamour. Let us separate our waste.
The writer is Environmentalist/Freelance and a Consultant Consulting for the Waste Segregation & Composting Movement