By Cecil MENSAH
A state-of-the-art recycling plant worth several millions of Euros has been unveiled by Tidy Up Ghana Company Limited to recycle up to 200 tons of solid waste daily in the Accra metropolis.
The company acquired the plant in collaboration with Premier Bank with technical assistance from Heinz Begmann, a German technical company.
The plant is expected to create “The Help Station,” which will be a withholding site at Weija to receive garbage from trucks and tricycles, which hitherto travelled all the way to the Kpone dump site in the Tema enclave to offload; thereby saving cost.
The plant, when fully operational, will afford garbage truck and tricycle drivers the luxury of being able to collect a lot more garbage in the system.
According to Tidy Up Ghana Company Limited, waste collection has been done shoddily by drivers because heavy traffic situations turned the activity of carting refuse to improperly managed dump sites into a drudgery.
The company expects the plant to become fully operational by the end of the year, paving way for creating about 100 direct job opportunities and several in direct jobs in the Weija area.
It is the plan of the company and its partners to replicate the project in Kasoa in the Central Region, Agbogbloshie and Pantang, both in the Greater Accra Region, to help fight the filth menace that has engulfed the country.
Speaking in an interview after the unveiling of the plant Mr Stephen Kofi Ampofo, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Tidy Up, said it costs between $500 million and $600 million to put up such an ultra-modern plant.
According to him, processing waste in recent time has become capital intensive and a lot of business people are shying away from making investments in the area.
He revealed that it costs an investor about GHC700,000 to clear a single garbage truck from the ports of the country.
In view of this, he called on government to offer assistance to business entities that are willing to venture into waste management business in the country.
He explained that one of the major challenges to garbage processing in the country is the lack of sorting of refuse at the collection point.
He said this makes it difficult for the collection of refuse for processing. “Now, our operations will be centred on the recycling of card boards because many of the papers get to the site very dirty and cannot be salvaged,” he revealed.
