One exciting thing about this story you are about to read is that the man behind this ingenuity is smart, whether he adopted the idea or developed it on his own.

It’s a simple but beautiful story of someone recycling waste into something more 'not-so-wasteful-anymore,' and that is exactly what Ben Addo, the owner of the Abetifi Stone Age Park, did.

In 2010, after researchers at the University of Ghana visited a former community dumpsite, where household waste was deposited, for work, and discovered that artifacts retrieved date back to some 12,500 years, Ben thought it would be a great idea to turn the place into a tourist site.

With his mother already owning some parts of the land, he consulted with the chiefs of the area and got their blessings to take over the landfill area, plus additional acres, to redevelop it into his planned tourist destination.

It was a tough call, but Ben Addo was sure of what he wanted to do to the place, and he did.

Wondering what to do with the wastewater that cuts through the land he was transforming for tourism purposes, he got an idea to recycle it into clean water; not just water, but water that could fall off the hill and become a waterfall.

A brilliant idea, right? But how did he achieve this?

Speaking with the People & Places team on GhanaWeb TV, when the team visited Abetifi, he described all the technicalities and the innovation he developed just to make this dream a reality.

First, he had to build a purification system for the wastewater that comes from the kitchen and flows onto the land.

Ben Addo also explained how, underneath this ‘waterfall,’ he has built a tank where the water is harvested. A pump brings back the water to the top to water other plants on the side.

Watch the full episode below:



This article was originally published in September 2023 by GhanaWeb. It has been reproduced solely for educational purposes.