Chairman of the Committee on Environment, Science and Technology, Dr. Emmanuel Marfo has expressed worry over the springing up of residential facilities around an E-waste collection centre around the Atomic Energy Commission.
Dr. Marfo who made the observation when he led members on the committee to inspect the centre on Wednesday, 31 January 2024 noted that the houses around the facility should be prepared to deal with whatever consequences there is as they would take steps to let the local Assemblies know that there is a development there, hence if there is any intervention that can take place to make sure that the springing up stops because of the harmful effect it should be resolved and the Assembly should deal with it.
In an interview, he pointed out that one challenge is the land tenure when the Committee visited Agbogbloshie which was their first point of visit and the next point was Atomic Energy where they identified land encroachment as a serious challenge, hence the need to let the land encroachers know the purpose of the facility.
He further pointed out that the Committee has oversight responsibility over the Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation and its agencies and there has always been report on the building of a holding centre.
So as part of their work the committee decided to come to the field and look at what is being done; how E-waste is being handled from the collection to the facility point, as it has always been reported that it is being built for the purpose of handling E-waste so that industry and private people who are investing into recycle facilities would be assured of the location they can get the materials to feed their industry and where we can contain hazardous materials.
He affirmed that e-waste is one of the fastest growing solid wastes concerns globally and how to effectively manage it giving that our population is increasing as construction of these electronic gadgets keeps going on including computers, air-conditioners, refrigerators, mobile phones among others.
“How are we going to handle the waste going forward? Hence the reason that committee decided to monitor the progress we have made as a country”, he pointed out.
On their impression after the tour, he noted that, so far so good as far as the pilot project is concerned it looks like the project handlers know what they are doing. “They can forecast and know how the future would look like and they are proposing a number of things that we think would help”.
By Kwaku Sakyi-Danso
