One exciting thing about this story you are about to read is that the man behind this ingenuity is a smart one; whether he may have adopted the idea or developed it on his own.
And 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, from where household waste was deposited, for work, and discovered that artifacts retrieved there 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 owner some parts of the land, he consulted with the chiefs of the area and got their blessings to take over the landfill area, plus added acres, to redevelop it into his planned tourist destination.
Tough call but Ben Addo was sure of what he wanted to do to the place, and he did.
And 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 one that could fall off the hill and become a waterfall.
Brilliant idea, right, but how did he achieve this?
Speaking with Wonder Ami Adu-Asare, host of People & Places 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 though, he had to build a purification system for the waste water that comes from the kitchen and flows onto the land.
(Watch the video below from 12 minutes 35 seconds to get a better understanding of his description)
“This is our purification system. So, we have the kitchen behind. The waste water comes in here; it’s piped to this side. So, as you can see, it’s a filter, and it doesn’t smell. This is because the soaps and the oils and everything have formed a layer on top. So, the freshwater comes under here and passes through the rocks.
“… and the water passes through this pipe… through these rocks – when it comes here, it is clean. And charcoal takes out the scent and the scent out of it. So, by the time it gets to this point, it is clean and we’ve laid the pipes here, and that is the reason too we’ve made these flower beds because we didn’t want to show the pipes. It serves as a cover.
“So, it’s all underneath here… so, this is the water. The pipe is laid under here and it comes out through this side and as you can see, it’s very clean and you can drink if you want. And so, the water goes down and that is what we are using as our waterfall,” he explained.
Ben Addo also explained how, underneath this ‘waterfall,’ he has built a tank where the water is harvested, from where a pump brings back the water to the top to water some other plants on the side.
Watch the full video of People & Places with Wonder Ami Adu-Asare below:
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