Waste & Recycling Management

The sector is largely supported by international donors, research institutes working on these issues such as IWMI (International Water management Institute) have been established in Ghana for many years and a Ghanaian industrial player (ZoomLion) has developed a country-wide waste collection network, but structured waste management remains a challenge. The main waste treatment remains often limited to landfill management and recycling initiatives are now a few drops of water in an ocean of abandoned waste. Sorting at source, however, if organized could give quick and spectacular visible results as the composition of waste is essentially composed of organic matter and plastic.

There is also a reflection to be done on the import of second-hand material (especially textile and electronic) from western countries to control the fact that northern countries take advantage of this to export their textile and electronic waste by mixing them with second hand products that can still be used. By subcontracting their waste recycling obligations to the lowest bidder, they have encouraged the emergence of waste exporters, often linked to mafia networks, to the countries of the South. These increasingly structured value chains have imagined that to have the waste accepted for import into Africa, it was necessary to mix it with similar second-hand products and to force the buyers to buy batches blindly. This is what happens in the Katanamo market in Accra where second hand textile traders buy blind lots of used clothes of 50 kg of which almost 40% is textile waste that ends up in wild dumps on the beaches of Ghana. Meanwhile, NGOs like OXFAM in the UK are reporting £39 million in revenue from the sale of second-hand products in their financial results 2021. EMAUS in France has similar revenues and it is now clear that the waste recycling obligations that are increasingly weighing on these NGOs in Western countries due to tightening environmental legislation has led them to turn the cost of recycling textile and other wastes into revenue by indirectly selling them as second-hand items.

Concerning Electronics which suffers from the same disease it is necessary to note however today, the "Environmentally Sound Disposal and Recycling of E-waste in Ghana" project, which began in 2016 with a budget of €25 million, is trying to provide solutions in the Agbogbloshie area of the capital city of Accra, which has been the subject of numerous media reports.

In a more general way and for the capital region, Accra, which concentrates most of the urban waste production in Ghana, the topography is likely to facilitate the installation of waste recycling projects. Indeed, Accra is bordered by two lagoons that drain virtually all untreated waste to the sea. It is then possible to imagine using these lagoons as logistical vectors of this waste to collect it in a mechanically organized way at the mouth of the lagoon towards the sea. There is even an ancient dam at the outlet of the Korle Lagoon that could be rehabilitated to prevent plastic waste from flowing into the ocean.

For foreign companies, business opportunities could arise in the future, especially in the development of a recycling economy and studies are underway to validate the economic profitability of waste processing.

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