The Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, has ordered the shutdown of two steel companies at Tema Free Zones enclave.
The two companies, United Steel and Rider Steel at the Free Zones enclave are cited for flouting environmental regulations of the country.
Deputy Executive director of the EPA, Ebenezer Appiah in an interview with Joy FM said, "As per the procedures when you have such noncompliances issues you engage them after your investigations and then agree on a certain roadmap to ensure that it is fixed permanently, our records indicate that we have exhausted that process and we are not waiting anymore we wrote to the two companies on the first of July to shut down operations and then fix the problem before we can allow them to work.."
Ghana ranked 124 in the 2018 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) which ranks 180 countries on environmental health and ecosystem vitality. What this means is that the country has performed poorly when it comes to being environmentally safe.
Poor air quality kills people. Worldwide, bad outdoor air caused an estimated 4.2 million premature deaths in 2016 out of which about 90 per cent of them are in low- and middle-income countries like Ghana. That’s according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
In Ghana, WHO estimates that air pollution from all sources caused about 28,000 deaths in 2016, over 4,000 of them being children under the age of 16. In the Greater Accra Region alone, outdoor pollution caused some 2,000 deaths in 2017, the WHO asserts.
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