Managing Director of the Kumasi Compost and Recycling Plant (KCarp), Samuel Ntumy, has disclosed the facility is capable of recovering 90% of the materials in waste for onward processing and value addition.
According to him, only 10% of the waste ends up at landfills thereby making the Kumasi plant one of the best waste management facilities in the West Africa sub-region.
He indicated that this ensures efficient use of landfills because a site that would normally last two years will now last ten times longer because not many materials are disposed of as a result of the processing.
“You can clearly see the mathematics speaks for itself. We can’t keep destroying land and we can’t keep dumping anywhere.
“A lot of urban areas are sprawling out and we can’t even find land to manage our waste and we are compelled to go further and further to construct landfill sites.
“So the little land we can use for landfill, we have to use them as judiciously as possible and what KCarp does is to enable us to use a particular landfill ten times longer”
Mr. Ntumy disclosed these when members of the Parliamentary Press Corps (PPC) toured the facility on Friday to update themselves on the Integrated Recycling and Compost Plant (IRECoP) initiative launched by Zoomlion Ghana Limited in collaboration with the government.
The team visited the solid and liquid waste facilities to check out the recycling processes and also the unit where plastic is processed into pellets for industry and export.
KCarp is the third such facility to be constructed beside the two in Accra to provide efficient systems for managing city waste.
Since then similar waste management facilities have been constructed in the Volta, Oti, Northern, Savannah, Bono and Ahafo Regions among others. Most of these, which are over 80% complete, have conducted test runs and gearing up to go into operation soon. Most are also equipped to process not only solid waste but medical and liquid waste.
Mr. Ntumy indicated that since its commissioning in 2020, the KCarp has had a good run and gone beyond being just a disposal site to becoming a material recovery, value addition and recycling plant.
He disclosed that compost has become the largest product of the facility in view of the fact that the region’s waste material is made of 65% organic material.
This, he said, is distributed nationwide with plans advanced to go into the African and subsequently the international market. According to him, the facility currently produces 3,000 50gk bags of compost on average but this number can be increased on request.
Other products are plastics, which are processed into pellets for the Ghanaian plastic industry and also exported abroad to countries including Turkey.
He indicated that another solid waste processing unit has been constructed and is ready to go into operation, which will increase the waste processed from approximately 800 tons to 1200 tons per day.
The facility, he said, has created over 800 jobs both direct and indirect and assured that his number will go up significantly as more processing units are added.
Mr. Ntumy stated that the challenge KCarp faces currently is finance, which compels the company to dig deep to keep operating as a result of payment delays.
