The 2018 Ghana Extractive Industry Safety Conference has been held in Takoradi to discuss dangerous goods, Global Standards and existing practices.

The annual conference provides the platform for addressing policy regulation and compliance issues that leads to institutional reforms at both public and private sector levels on occupational health and safety (OHS) Standards.

This year, the conference hinged on bringing together players in the mining, oil and gas industry to share and educate each other on the proper methods of handling and usage of dangerous products.

The chairman of the Sekondi Takoradi Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Ato Van-Ess explained that because of the potentially hazardous nature of the oil and gas as environment, requires for such platforms for knowledge sharing.

“We want to use this conference to create the awareness about dangerous goods and to find a way of getting industry players, the Authorities, the Government and all other stakeholders to understand, first of all, what dangerous goods are and how we are going to make sure that we advocate for better policies to protect our people against dangerous goods,” he indicated.

Participants lauded the initiative and called for more of such engagements in order to increase their knowledge and skills in ensuring safety in their respective sectors.

Wilfred Johnson, General Manager of Zeal Environmental, the waste management company in the Port of Takoradi, stated that, being at the end of the process chain of these dangerous goods, the company has adopted some measures to implement to improve their processes.

“We at Zeal have also picked a lot of points from this seminar and this conference that we are going to implement in order to improve,” he said.

The Terminal Manager for the Takoradi Container Terminal(TACOTEL), Richmond Appiah, acknowledged the significance of the program, because dangerous goods are continually encountered in the port industry, hence it is very important to improve on their skills to handle them safely.

“I think this conference, GEISCON 2018 is very useful because we are all sharing ideas on the best practices in handling dangerous goods as it is done in the Ghana ports,” he said.