By Muniratu Akweley Issah
Accra, Feb. 02, GNA – The Ledzokuku Municipal Assembly (LeKMA) says it will step up enforcement of its sanitation bye-laws to ensure a clean and healthy Municipality this year.
Mr Yaw Boateng Edusei, Head of Waste Management said the Assembly would tackle issues head on and crack the whip on sanitation offenders within the municipality.
He expressed worry that despite lots of education, the populace had been adamant in changing their attitude.
Speaking in an interview with the Ghana News Agency, Mr. Edusei said the Assembly had begun a monitoring exercise to detect and punish sanitation offenders within the municipality.
“This is jointly being executed by the rapid response team and environmental health officers to help curb sanitation offences recorded daily to ensure a clean environment,” Mr Edusei said.
He added: ” We have an 18-member rapid response security team who have been positioned at some areas within the Assembly’s jurisdiction including the Accra Mall, Adoemmli and other hotspots noted for poor sanitation conditions and such offenders would be processed for court.”
The Municipal Waste Management Officer said as part of improving sanitation at the Accra Mall Area, traders would be compelled to pay a spot fine if they were caught trading at unapproved parameters.
“Their trading activities cause littering and poor sanitation at the premises,” he observed.
Mr Edusei noted that most of the indiscriminate dumping of refuse is attitudinal and would soon embark on awareness creation among the populace while Assembly members had also been tasked to help fight the menace.
He said to make the awareness creation successful, communal refuse containers had also been placed at vantage points for households to dump their refuse at a token and explained that the containers were placed strategically to serve low level income earning households and those who could not afford door to door services.
The Assembly was also in the process of bringing all waste management companies and tricycle waste collectors under one umbrella for their operations to be monitored and supervised.
The Municipal Waste management Officer also disclosed that a policy document for plastic waste management was ready while formulation of a bye-law was underway and expected to be completed by the end of February, as a committee is currently in the process of putting documents together.
The formulation of the bye-law would help with guidelines for proper handling and management of plastic waste, curb indiscriminate dumping as well as prosecution.
” We realised that about 60 per cent of waste materials collected are plastics, though they are not heavy, they occupy more space which makes refuse containers full frequently. Once the plastics are separated, the refuse containers will serve communities for a much longer time while scientific treatments were made as part of management,” he added.
He added that “buy back” centres would soon be established at vantage points within the municipality where individuals would send their plastics there for a token.
GNA