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COB-A Industries, manufacturers of Standard Drinking Water, is establishing a multi-million-dollar water treatment plant to feed its sachet water and bottling plant at Supomu Dunkwa in the Shama District in the Western Region. The facility, which is the phase II of the existing manufacturing plants, has the capacity to produce a daily amount of 1.6 million litres of water, whose sources are huge wells created deep in the Pra River basin. Speaking to the Daily Graphic after the inaugural ceremony, the Managing Director (MD) of the company, Mr Divine Otoo Agorhom, said the company had identified a huge demand for its product in the region which must be satisfied. The move by the company to establish the plant in the region was part of its efforts to make its products available to its customers while creating jobs and sending signals to other corporate bodies to move to other parts of the country. The first phase of the project was the setting up of the plant and the packaging factory at Supomu Dunkwa, which meant that its products had to be transported from Accra and Tema to the region. �Our concentration on the Tema and Accra facilities was, therefore, creating an additional huge transportation cost on the company and, therefore, it was economically wise to move to the region to set up,� he explained. The move, Mr Agorhom said, would cut down cost and ensure that safe water was distributed to its clients without necessarily incurring additional cost. �The company then took a decision to set up factories in the various regions and currently, it has set up factories in seven regions,� he said. Ramifications of galamsey The MD of COB-A said though the company faced several challenges in its attempt to set up a factory in a new and rapidly developing market, the biggest challenge was the effects of illegal mining (galamsey) activities currently going on in the River Pra and other water bodies in the region. He said the galamsey activities had destroyed the water and altered the chemical composition of the river to an extent that the company had to drill deep into the river basin to ensure that the water it drew into its purifying plant was not contaminated with crude oil and mercury.