The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is making a strong case to introduce higher taxes on imported used cars while taxes on new cars are drastically reduced.
The move, the Head of the Environmental Quality Department of the EPA, Mr Emmanuel K.E. Appoh, told the Daily Graphic, would help reduce the high levels of emission, which is reducing air quality in the country’s cities.
He said the current tax regime highly favoured used car imports, a situation that encouraged such imports at the expense of public health.
According to him, the situation is compounded by importation of fuel with high sulphur content — 3,000 parts per million — into the country.
“This is a public health issue that must be addressed to reduce the number of people silently dying from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.
“The Ghana Health Service did an assessment in 2010 and realised that respiratory ailment is second to malaria among the top 20 diseases in Ghana,” he said.
According to the EPA, the major sources of ambient air pollution include vehicular exhaust emissions—the largest emitters being older vehicles, emissions from industrial sources, domestic waste, healthcare waste, road and windblown dust, mercury fumes from artisanal/small-scale gold mining.
Cost to Ghana
According to the United Nations (UN) Environment statistics, in Ghana, close to 7,000 deaths in 2013 were attributed to outdoor air pollution, with the economic cost of premature deaths estimated at $5 billion.
With diesel emissions from urban buses said to pose a significant health risk and constituting up to 70 per cent of the risk of exposure to air toxics, experts believe that the solution is in improved public transport, particularly the introduction of soot-free buses.
The EPA recently hosted a workshop for environmental and transport experts across the continent to promote soot-free bus and sustainable public transport in Accra.
According to experts, soot-free engines utilise high-efficiency diesel particulate filters that provide up to 99 per cent reduction of small particles that are harmful to human health.
Other soot-free engines include those that utilise compressed natural gas, electricity and biodiesel to comply with European standards.
Source: Daily Graphic
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Look at EPA who plant 1000 trees and want the whole world to know. Please come again.
C.r.a.zy suggestion by the lazy EPA guy.... Import taxes on cars to Ghana are already very high. This lazy EPA guy must go and attend to how they will protect the environment from galamsey operations which is causing more damage to our environment. They sit in their offices and issue licences to galamsey people to destroy forests.
I'm with you Yao. The EPA should sit down and reason well. Are they saying new vehicles can never be old to become pollutants? The solution is simple; every vehicle, new or old should pass a standard test set by the EPA before allowing it to ply our roads, period! Ghanaians have the penchant of easy and unreasonable solutions, abba!
I bet you Ghanaian policy makers would always come up with the most ridiculous measures to abate a problem. Is this EPA man alright in his upstairs? Travel to other parts of the world to see. In the US all vehicles mandatorily go through an emission test every 2 years to check the hydrocarbons they emit into the environment. Cars that fail the test must be repaired and retested. So why can't we do same in Ghana instead of this ***barred word*** idea from this man? And more so, was it not the same EPA and the NPA that allowed high sulphur petrol to be imported into Ghana?
EPA, concentrate on those burning car tyres and stop them, they are the ones polluting the environment.....
I fully agree with you on the call to increase taxes on used cars. You pay more import tax on new car than on used one. If the import tax on new cars are reduced drastically, then I'm very sure people will switch to importing new vehicles.