The Vice-President gave the advice in a keynote address read on his behalf at the launch of the Environmental Performance Rating Disclosure ‘Akoben’ Programme in Accra on Wednesday.Despite providing thousands of people with employment opportunities and making important contributions to foreign exchange earnings, mercury is associated with pollution and land degradation that have intensified within the mining industry in recent years. The manufacturing sector is also replete with companies dumping industrial waste and toxic substances into water bodies, thereby exposing people to the dangers
that come with such substances.
The Akoben programme is an environmental management initiative developed by the EPA to assess the performance of mining and manufacturing industries through the use of a five-colour rating scheme.
A similar tool, called Programme for Pollution Control Evaluation and Rating (PROPER), was first introduced in 1995 in Indonesia.
However, the new method is distinct in that it is specifically used to assess mining and manufacturing companies, as well as contribute to the international effort in the field of environmental rating and public disclosure.
The five colours are gold, green, blue, orange and red, which indicate environmental performance ranging from excellent to poor.
Akoben, which is a local Adinkra symbol, stands for vigilance and wariness and also focuses on environmental outcomes that indicate various levels of environmental and health risks, the probability of restoration of environmental conditions in the long-term and the quality of corporate commitment to social issues.
In the first results of the ratings released by the EPA, none of the 60 companies involved went beyond the orange. The Vice-president said the overall performance of companies rated were sad and urged them to take steps to review their environmental performance and undertake actions to fix their environmental emissions and discharges.
The Minister of Environment, Science and Technology, Ms Sherry Ayittey, said the initiative symbolised the ministry’s resolve to tackle the challenges of environmental degradation and natural resource management through transparency, disclosure, public awareness creation and community participation.
She said the ministry had decided to make the rating system part of the Environmental Day Celebration in Ghana, “where corporate bodies will be evaluated, rated, honoured or exposed on their environmental management practices”.
The Executive Director of the EPA, Mr J.A. Allotey, said companies that failed to heed persistent advice to streamline their operations to suit the rating system would be prosecuted as a last resort.
Source Graphic Ghana
