 Board Chairman of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, Prof. Andrews Seth Ayettey In that regard, officials of enrich, the Canadian waste management company, will be in the country next month to conduct feasibility studies into the project which will be sited close to the Korle Lagoon.
The Board Chairman of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, Prof. Andrews Seth Ayettey, gave a hint of the project when he conducted a team of officials of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly on a tour of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital to discuss measures to arrest the sewage challenges confronting the hospital.
The plant will be used in treating some 100 tonnes of waste generated daily by the hospital and its environs.
The hospital has one of the oldest sewage systems in the country with some sewage pipes said to be as old as 90 years.
Last month, liquid waste from a burst sewage pipe inundated streets close to the mortuary with a heavy stench.
It is to deal with such occurrences that the Mayor of Accra, Mr. Alfred Okoe Vanderpuye, was at the hospital to inspect some of the sewage sites that needed attention.
As a short-term measure, the mayor said the AMA would deploy trucks from its Waste Management Department to cart the liquid waste at various points at the hospital daily.
He said the AMA would ensure that the problem did not develop into a serious one by eliminating the environmental problems confronting the hospital.
The AMA boss pledged the city authority’s commitment to close down the Lavender Hill and establish in its place, “a modern waste treatment plant that has more scientific liquid waste facility with digesters to receive and treat the liquid waste before it is discharged into the ocean”.
He commended officials of the hospital for measures taken so far to control the situation.
The Chief Executive of the hospital, Professor Nii Otu Nartey, for his part, said the hospital was currently rehabilitating its sewage lines from the main hospital to the Korle-Bu Polyclinic.
He, therefore, urged the AMA to support the hospital in its efforts to deal with the waste problems. In other parts of the world, human waste is converted into energy for use with residues as fertilizer.
In Rwanda for instance, the country has installed biogas plants in all 14 of its prisons as part of measures to use renewable energy rather than the charcoal and firewood that provides 85 per cent of its energy needs.
It plans to take biogas into Rwandan homes, where just 14 per cent of the population currently has access to electricity.
In Didcot, a town in Oxfordshire in the UK, gas made from human waste and supplied via the national grid is used to heat homes
Source: Daily Graphic
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