Ghana's quest to recover ozone depleting substances and address the issue of high energy consumption through the use of secondhand refrigerators is on course, following the setting up of a Fridge Disposal Plant in Accra in February this year.
The plant, situated at Kwabenya, has a mobile de-gassing equipment which is the first of its kind in Africa.
Manned and operated by the City Waste Group, the facility has, since its establishment, de-gassed 3,000 old refrigerators. One hundred and seventy five kilogrammes of gas has been retrieved from the fridges so far.
They are chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), 100 kilogrammes; refrigerant 134a gas, 60 kilogrammes, and refrigerant 600a, 15 kilogrammes.
While the CFC will be exported for destruction after extraction, the R134a and R600a will be cleaned in Ghana and used locally, since they are not as environmentally harmful as the CFC.
The CFC, which plays a greater role in the depletion of the ozone layer (layer in earth's atmosphere which absorbs most of the sun's ultra-violet radiation), is used in refrigeration systems, air conditioning propellants, in aerosol applications and also as a solvent.
Rebate scheme
The plant site is where old functional fridges handed over under the government’s Refrigerator Rebate and Exchange Scheme, a joint project by the Energy Commission and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), are disposed of.
Participating shops in the rebate scheme where people could get new fridges after handing over old fridges include Appliance Masters, Somovision, Melcom and Rowi, while Ecobank is partnering the scheme through affordable loans.
The scheme, now nationwide, was launched in Accra and Tema in September 2012 to ensure that Ghanaians replaced old power-consuming refrigerators with new energy efficient ones. Under the initiative, 50,000 units of refrigerators are to be replaced to save an estimated 35 million units of electricity.
An inefficient refrigerator can drain close to 1,200 KWh or 40 per cent of the total household energy, costing about GH¢216.
Determined to deal with energy wastage, Ghana, on January 1, 2013, banned the importation of used refrigerators into the country. Following an appeal from importers, the deadline was extended to June 30, 2013.
Scrap yard
The site for the plant has virtually become a scrap yard, as the old fridges that have been de-gassed are kept there.
The management of City Waste Company has, accordingly, engaged 26 young men and women to help the company to properly get rid of the old fridges. Apart from de-gassing the fridges, other components such as the ferrous metals, copper, aluminium and plastics are separated.
The Managing Director of City Waste, Mr Jurgen Meinel, told the Daily Graphic that the project was going on successfully.
He said equipment being used for the de-gassing was special, as it also decontaminated the oils in the compressor of fridges.
“In de-gassing, no harmful gas comes out into the atmosphere,” he added.
According to Mr Meinel, the company took delivery of 1,000 fridges every month for de-gassing.
Asked whether or not the company would close down the plant after de-gassing the 50,000 old fridges the project had targeted, he said no and that work would continue on a small scale.
Challenge
The challenge the company is facing is getting a market for some of the ferrous metals which could not be used by the steel manufacturing companies in Tema.
“The ban on the export of ferrous metals is a big challenge because we are facing a bit of a problem to sell our metals, since the metals from the fridges are not of high quality,” he said.
EPA’s role
Apart from the mobile de-gassing equipment, the plant site has an office for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), where the gases extracted are weighed for confirmation of weight and further transferred into bigger cylinders.
Here, machines or equipment have been set up to tell the kind of ozone depleting substances that have been extracted from the fridges.
The National Ozone Depleting Substances Consultant for the EPA and UNDP, Mr Kwaku Ofori-Bruku, confirmed that the country was going to export the CFC gas because it did not have the technology to destroy it.
He explained that the equipment for destroying the gas was so expensive that it was cheaper for the county to export it.
He said although the UNDP was helping the government for three years, the intention was that after three years, the money that would be saved through the sale of the gases would be ploughed back to continue the project.
The UNDP, in collaboration with the EPA, the Energy Commission and the Centre for Rural Industrial Research, has developed a strategy to provide climate and ozone benefits through the integrated plan for energy efficiency, climate mitigation and ozone depleting substances for the refrigeration sector.
Ghana last year introduced the rebate system to retrieve old fridges to save high energy usage and save the ozone layer from CFC gases that were contained in the fridges.
Ghana is a signatory to the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer (a protocol to the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer).
The protocol is an international treaty designed to protect the ozone layer by phasing out the production of numerous substances believed to be responsible for ozone depletion.
By Emmanuel Bonney/Daily Graphic/Ghana
