OUR WASTE MANAGEMENT IN THE 21ST CENTURY

By Doreen Hammond
The driver of a waste collection truck was recently assaulted by residents of an area where he had gone to dump refuse. It was an unfortunate incident but the residents were offended that he was bringing filth and, therefore, disease to the area so they would not sit idle and watch him do that . That was why they took the law into their own hands.
But according to the driver, he had been carrying the waste for so long with no disposal site available hence his decision to dump it somewhere. The above scenario shows how dire the waste disposal situation in Accra has become. With old sites full and communities not ready to accommodate anymore of such sites, the future of our waste disposal looks rather bleak.
On my way from a funeral recently, I missed a turn and ended up somewhere on the Pantang Hospital Road, towards Abokobi where I encountered what can only be described as a frightening sight. A huge area full of refuse, supposed to be a dumping site right in the middle of a residential community. The area, to put it mildly, is inundated with plastic/polythene bags; especially those of pure water sachets. There is another huge rubbish dump at Achimota which is often decorated with vultures, full of plastic bags and stench. There may be other such refuse dumps in the city of Accra but these two are enough to humble you into fear.
What kind of waste management system are we practising? All that we are doing now is just transferring waste from one part of town to another. So you may be paying for your domestic waste to be carried away but the question is : Where is that waste headed for and how is it treated?
Our waste disposal methods, especially in this 21st Century brings to the fore the kind of leadership we have been cursed with as a people, both in the past and present. For instance, for how long will our leadership continue to play politics with this plastic bag menace as our environment continues to suffer choked gutters and its attendant floods? Has it not become more than obvious that we do not have the capacity to handle this type of waste and that the best way out is to ban it, as has been done in Rwanda and Kenya? After all we have not always lived with this polythene so why are we behaving as if without it our lives will come to a halt?
The sad reality is that any country which disposes of its waste in this crude manner in this 21st Century is only courting cholera and similar diseases as we are doing now.
As we walk in our neighbourhoods we encounter them; as we drive on the streets of Accra and even the remotest parts of our land, we are constantly reminded of how plastic waste now rules our lives; they fly all over hitting our windscreens and several of them are trapped even in our barbed wire fences. We swim with plastic bags on our beaches and even when we dig to plant, black polythene bags stare at us!
At traffic lights in the city are found itinerant vendors of rodenticide, powders and traps for control of rats, cockroaches and other crawling and flying household pests. These vendors seem to be doing brisk business. At the Goldhouse traffic lights, for instance, one of these hawkers shoved the dried carcass of mice at my side glass in a bid to advertise his rodenticide which he had nicknamed “Kwakwe last stop”, literally translated as “the last stop for mice”. Even from our primary school environmental studies which has now been named Citizenship Education, we know the kind of environment these pests thrive in—filth! The health effects of the continuous use of these rodenticide and powders is another matter but we have lived in insanitary conditions for years now with no sign of solution in sight.
Or are we waiting until such time that we begin choking in the filth before we go and contract a foreign loan and contract a foreign company to come and deal with it like we did with the Korle Lagoon and others? Or we are waiting for the IMF and others to come in and tell us that we live in filth so we should do this and that before the next budgetary support would be released?
Our leadership must begin to take the bull by the horns and take drastic decisions even if the short-term effect would be unpleasant. Can you imagine where this polythene menace will take us in the next 10 years? Your guess is as good as mine.
The Accra Metropolitan Chief Executive, Mr Alfred Vanderpuije, recently announced that from 2015, Accra would transform its waste disposal methods and turn waste into other productive uses.
Well said, Mr Mayor, but the sad reality is that at the rate we are moving, we may not be alive to put his beautiful plans in action in 2015. If we must tackle the waste menace then it is now or never. And this is where I think Mr Vanderpuije’s focus should be.
To put it bluntly, Accra’s waste disposal arrangements in this modern day and age and that of several other towns and cities in this land of ours are not only shambolic but a shame. We must begin to look at a more holistic waste disposal industry that goes beyond just collecting our waste from one point to another and this must be fast, for time is not on our side.
Writer’s email: aamakai@hotmail.com