November 15

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Health benefits of peanut oil
Cholesterol levels
Unlike many other vegetable oils,
peanut oil is actually free of any cholesterol,
which is one of the major
contributing factors to complicated
heart conditions such as atherosclerosis,
which is basically clogging of
the arteries.
Heart health
Peanut oil contains monounsaturated
fatty acids, like oleic acid, which
increase the levels of ‘good cholesterol’
in the blood.
Cancer prevention
Peanut oil also has high levels of
polyphenol antioxidants,
including resveratrol. This compound
works to eliminate free radicals,
which are the dangerous byproducts
of cellular metabolism that are responsible
for a huge range of diseases
in the body, including cancer.
Blood pressure
Resveratrol has another important
function in the body. It interacts
with various hormones in the body
that affect blood vessels, like angiotensin,
which constricts vessels
and arteries.
WWW.DAILYHERITAGE.COM.GH
DAILY HERITAGE THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2018
&Env.
Zoomlion and AMA partner Cape
Town to achieve clean Accra
BY ZOOMLION GHAN
ZOOMLION GHANA
Limited and the Accra
Metropolitan Assembly
(AMA) have collaborated
with the City of
Cape Town in South
Africa to be able to feed into President
Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s
mantra of making Accra one of the
cleanest cities in the sub-region.
This effort by the two organisations
having great interest in waste
management in Accra appears to be
drumming home the good old saying
of ‘Together we stand/build’ for them
to adopt best practices in relation to
the President’s ambition. Kudos to the
AMA and Zoomlion Ghana Limited,
and more especially to the City of
Cape Town.
What Ghanaians should now be
trusting the two entities to do is that
they will work together to take Ghana,
especially Accra, from its current state
of waste spots to a better destination
like the City of Cape Town that will
reflect the President’s stance of making
Accra the cleanest city of the
whole of West Africa, and anything
less than that collaborative drive by
them will be disingenuous to the people
of Ghana.
AMA and Zoomlion visit
Cape Town
A team of eleven (11) waste management
practitioners from the AMA
and Zoomlion visited the highly-respected
South African richly developed
city (Cape Town) to understudy
their Integrated Waste Management
System (IWMS) to be able to apply
their seeming successful modern technologies
and approaches to addressing
the waste challenges of Ghana’s capital
city, Accra, which is contemporarily
known as the gate way to West Africa.
It is obvious that as the gateway to the
sub-region, it must incontestably be
clean, neat and beautiful to address the
needs of tourists.
The City of Cape Town has developed
state-of- the-art integrated waste
management systems which have
largely addressed waste management
issues in Cape Town and its environs.
Three waste management facilities
at Bellville, Kraaifontein and Vissershock
have widely handled the waste
challenges in the city of Cape Town,
admirably said some residents of the
city.
A task force of 33 members of the
law enforcement unit under the city
authority is responsible for arresting,
charging and ensuring statutory laws
are strictly abided by. The citizenry are
abundantly aware of their duty to dispose
all kinds of waste at these facilities
or use the container/bin system
and that is what has contributed to
making the city a tourism centre
among other enviable sites such as the
Table Mountain, Waterfront Mall, the
Red Bus ride, which gives one the opportunity
to see the city from many
positions, and the Long Street
among others.
At the Bellville Landfill and
Waste Management Facility, which
occupies a 73 hectare of land,
there are units of the landfill section
where solid waste is collected
and compacted immediately in
order not for the landfill to be
overwhelmed by waste, a Garden
Waste Section where unwanted flowers
and trees felled from the city are
brought and disposed of and later
chopped into pieces by private contractors
and eventually used in producing
compost fertilizer for sale. Also is
the Builders Rubbles’ Section, where
broken walls and unwanted bricks are
brought and offloaded and fragmented
into fine sand for construction
of low cost houses and the less graded
ones used for compacting the landfill.
At the same facility is the Liquid
Waste Facility, where the treated leach
water is used to water the landfill
roads to calm the evident dust on dry
days. These are all efforts to reduce,
recycle and re-use what is being sent
to the final disposal site, a practice
Zoomlion is also known for already in
Ghana.
Bellville South Landfill
Bellville South Landfill, which collects
in excess of 40,000 tons of waste
in a month, is due for closure for landfill
purposes by city authorities but will
remain a transfer station where waste
will now be received and transferred
to a proposed regional landfill site. In
South Africa, before an area can be allowed
to operate as a landfill it must
be completely fenced unlike what is
currently practised in Ghana.
Unlike Ghana where waste is transported
by trucks and motorized tricycles,
the City of Cape Town has
advanced by using trains to transport
their waste to final disposal sites, a
practice Ghana will need to emulate to
reduce traffic on the roads in terms of
haulage.
The Kraaifontein Integrated Waste
Management Facility (KIWMF), on
the other hand, was designed to receive
and transfer the waste load in
western Cape Town. The facility is the
first integrated
•President Nana Akufo-Addo
waste
management
facility of its kind in South Africa. As
a broad integrated waste management
facility, KIWMF encompasses a transfer
station, drop-off facility, container
handling area, a chipping area for the
processing of green waste (garden
waste), hazardous materials holding
area for small quantities received at the
drop-off, e-waste and oil holding containers
for oil waste.
Facility managers say the compaction
hall is used for compacting
waste into containers and a dual
weighbridge system with two incoming
and two outgoing weighbridges.
That integrated attitude, having all activities
of waste-handling on-site, is
what makes the facility unique. Almost
half of the waste that is received at
the site is sorted and sold off to private
recycling contractors.
Management says the city authorities
have an entrenched position to
keep the city clean. Therefore dumping
appropriately at the landfill or
transfer stations is free, which incentivizes
citizens to dump at the facilities
in order not to fall prey to the everwatching
men and camera law enforcement
authorities.
Replicating waste taskforce
What Ghana needs to do in this direction
is to replicate the Waste Taskforce
units, which have been started by
AMA and the Kumasi Metropolitan
Assembly to all Metropolitan, Municipal
and District Assemblies (MMDAs),
and empower them to arrest, charge,
fine and prosecute using the sanitation
courts. The Ministry of Justice and
Attorney General should also expand
the Sanitation Court system to all regions
and MMDAs to address the
sanitation issues in Ghana.
Vissershok Waste Management
Facility, on the
other hand, combines
both solid and liquid
waste management
whereby there is the liquid
waste management
facility and an engineered
landfill receiving
waste material such as
tetra pak, builder's rubble,
garage waste, motor
oil, clean garden waste,
paper and cardboard, cans
and metal, glass bottles,
polystyrene, plastic and low to
medium hazardous waste. This
facility however does not receive e-
waste. The facility which is engineered
and projected to serve as a regional
landfill site to the city of Cape Town,
beginning this year, is multipurpose
and has the capacity to run for many
years.
City authorities say their waste
management style is geared towards
minimizing waste from homes, offices
and facilities that are meant for the
final disposal site and indeed it does
reduce waste by 30%, a mechanism
that is hugely laudable and beneficial
to the people.
The most critical lessons learnt in
this collaboration that the Government
of Ghana (GoG) will need to
consider greatly is the fact that in
Cape Town the political will to fight
waste is very evident and high in that
waste management infrastructure is
largely the problem of government
and not in the hands of the private
sector like in Ghana where efforts to
address the waste management problems
is in the hands of the private sector.
Of all the waste management
efforts made such as the Accra Compost
and Recycling Plant the Kumasi
Compost and Recycling Plant, which
is 85% complete, the Accra Sewerage
System and the plastic recycling plants
such as Universal Plastics Processing
and Recycling and YEECO Plastics,
are initiated and owned by the private
sector, precisely the Jospong Groups
of Companies.
In Cape Town, for instance, is the
Kraaifontein Integrated Waste Management
Facility, which is a waste
transfer facility. KIWMF is solely
owned by the government and patronised
by the private contractors on contract
basis but the case is different in
Ghana as the only two transfer stations
at Teshie and Achimota, both in
Accra, are owned by the Jospong
Groups of Companies, owners of
Zoomlion Ghana Ltd, Ghana’s waste
management experts and leaders.
Government to create enabling
environment
What is needed in this respect
would be that government will further
create a more enabling environment
and provide full corperation and support
for the private sector to take the
country to paradise in terms of waste
management
The other lesson is the South
African Government’s commitment to
vote funds for waste management activities.
Will the Ghana government
exercise the same commitment in delivering
on even its annual plans and
budgets to develop one modern engineered
landfill and a transfer station in
each of the 10 regions to ease the
waste problems? This is the conundrum
at hand in Ghana. The kind of
landfills in the regional capitals leaves
much to be desired, talk least of what
is at the district levels, which are better
described as dumping sites.
It was, however, unfortunate some
residents in the city this writer interacted
with in Cape Town do not have
express idea about how waste is managed
and even who manages it but
knows that it is an offence to litter or
dump haphazardly, which is a plus to
the law enforcement unit of the city’s
waste management department.
It, therefore, presupposes that city
authorities would have to intensify
public education to create more awareness
as to how waste is managed and
reorient citizens of their mandate on
waste management in Cape Town, an
effort that Ghana will need badly too.
Team members especially admired
the manner in which waste is sectionalized
at the facilities and how serious
the city authorities see waste management
and the security adherence at the
facility. The waste practitioners say the
waste reduction rate at 30% by the
CCT is commendable. Ghana will
need to step up efforts towards a similar
foot.