When President John Dramani Mahama relaunched National Sanitation Day on September 6, 2025, the promise was clear: a cleaner, healthier Ghana through collective action.
But if the waste we clear on the first Saturday of every month is still being openly burned, as happens in many Accra neighbourhoods and dumpsites, we are trading visible litter for invisible poison.
Ghana generates roughly 12,710 tonnes of solid waste daily, yet only about 10 per cent is properly managed; open dumping and burning remain the default in many communities.
During sanitation clean-ups, crews and residents often pile plastics, textiles, e-waste, mixed refuse and set them alight because collection trucks are delayed, landfills are distant, or informal burning is the cheapest “disposal” option.
Open burning is especially dangerous because combustion is incomplete.
It releases fine particulate matter (PM₂.₅ and PM₁₀), black carbon, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and critically persistent organic pollutants such as dioxins and furans, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and toxic metals from plastics and e-waste.
In burning hotspots, studies report PM₂.₅ levels above 100 µg/m³ (over 20× the WHO annual guideline) and spikes beyond 200 µg/m³ during active burning.
These emissions drive acute and chronic illness: respiratory disease (chronic cough, wheeze/asthma, bronchitis, shortness of breath, COPD), cardiovascular stress (elevated blood pressure and heart disease risk), and toxic/carcinogenic effects from dioxins/furans and PAHs (liver damage, immune and endocrine disruption, certain cancers, adverse pregnancy outcomes).
Air pollution was responsible for about 32,500 deaths in Ghana in 2023, with Accra alone seeing thousands of premature deaths annually from PM₂.₅ exposure.
Workers and residents near Agbogbloshie and other e-waste sites inhale median PM₂.₅ around 99 µg/m³, nearly double city monitor readings, and face higher rates of respiratory and nervous system damage.
National Sanitation Day already mobilises municipalities, market associations, and residents; shops close from 6–10 a.m. on the first Saturday to enable clean-ups in focal areas such as Agbogbloshie, CBD, Kaneshie, and Chorkor, to mention a few.
That same coordination can stop open burning by changing what happens after the sweep.
Solutions
Issue a clear directive through MLGRD/AMA and other municipal assemblies, e.g. collected waste must not be burned and that violations attract penalties.
Deploy additional compactor trucks and temporary transfer points on clean-up days to prevent pile-and-burn shortcuts.
Separate plastics, textiles, organics, and e-waste before collection; burning mixed waste maximises dioxins/furans and PAHs.
Partner with recyclers and e-waste aggregators to remove cables, batteries, and circuit boards before any thermal treatment.
Prioritise engineered landfills with leachate and gas management over open dumps; use landfills only as a last resort after recycling/composting.
Accelerate waste-to-resource projects (e.g., bio-organic pellets, electricity, and eventually sustainable aviation fuel) to divert combustibles from open fires.
• Install low-cost PM₂.₅ monitors at dumpsites and waste-burning hotspots, and publish real-time data to enable communities to see the impact of stopping open burning.
National Sanitation Day can either entrench a collect-and-burn routine or become the turning point where Ghana treats waste as a resource and protects public health.
With 80 per cent of the District Assemblies Common Fund now directed to sanitation and new air quality regulations in place, the policy windows are open.
What’s needed is operational discipline, i.e. more trucks, better segregation, engineered disposal, and a strict no-burn enforcement culture.
If we do this, the first Saturday of every month will measure success not by how much we burned, but by how much we kept out of the air.
PM. refers to airborne particles ≤2.5 micrometres that penetrate deep into the lungs and bloodstream.
The WHO annual guideline is 5 µg/m³, and short-term spikes above 100–200 µg/m³ are linked to acute respiratory and cardiovascular events.
Open burning of mixed waste, especially plastics and e-waste, produces dioxins and furans, persistent organic pollutants that bioaccumulate and are associated with cancer, liver damage, and immune/endocrine disruption.
Measuring PM₂.₅ at dumpsites and burning hotspots, and tracking seasonal trends, provides actionable data for enforcement and public advisories.
The writer is an Environmental Engineer,
Michigan Technological University.
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