Accra, Oct. 7, GNA – Madam Sherry Ayittey, Minister of Environment, Science and Technology (MEST), has commended the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for instituting the environmental performance ratings to assess the level of compliance of manufacturing and mining companies in the country.

She said it was important for the country to protect its natural resources and then the main economic asset and that the EPA’s “AKOBEN” framework was a vital tool for good environmental governance and sustenance.

Madam Ayittey made the commendation when she launched the second “AKOBEN” programme, an environmental performance and ratings system adopted by the EPA to help reduce risks on the environment.

The Ghana "AKOBEN" programme seeks to rate the performance levels of the manufacturing and mining companies with regards to compliance of laid down environmental impact assessment procedures.

Companies in the mining and the manufacturing industries are therefore selected and monitored over a period to assess their compliance level and they are rated in Gold, Blue, Green, Orange and Red where red means poor, Orange satisfactory, Blue is good, Green represents very good while Gold is excellent.

Madam Ayittey said it was necessary to ensure that environmental disclosures were made compulsory to enable the public to help assess the negative impact of industrial operations and report the recalcitrant for the necessary action to be taken against them.

She appealed to the EPA to increase the number of companies on their ratings list to ensure that negative activities on the environment were reduced.

She advised communities living closer to water bodies to move upstream since their activities had the tendency of polluting the water, which they depended on for their livelihood.

Mr Daniel Amlalo, Acting Executive Director of the EPA, said the second disclosure of the AKOBEN was an important milestone for the EPA, which was helping to reduce pollution, increase compliance and environmental risks to enhance public awareness.

He said in less than one year since the launch of the AKOBEN it made a lot of impact on how manufacturing and mining companies managed the environment and that the programme had helped EPA to regulate environmental issues.

He said the EPA had identified some 50 enterprises, which would be added to the rating system and that the EPA was planning a clean city programme using the AKOBEN framework to ensure that the cities were clean.

Available environmental statistics of this year’s ratings and disclosure under AKOBEN in the operations of 60 companies making up of the mining and manufacturing companies performed poorly and unsatisfactorily.

The Abosso Goldfields Limited and the Newmont Ghana Limited performed well this year as compared to last year while Anglogold Ashanti, Goldfields Ghana, Prestea Sankofa Gold Limited recorded red.

Mr Amlalo said there has been a tremendous improvement in the operations of the companies and expressed the hope that the situation was likely to improve further in next year’s ratings and expressed regret that Ghana Bauxite Company failed to comply with the exercise and that the EPA may consider withdrawing the license of such companies.