The Local Government Minister, Mahama Ayariga, has put a number and an image to Accra’s sanitation crisis, roughly 1 million tonnes of accumulated refuse, a heap he has likened to a 10-storey building. His ministry has now secured space at the Adipa engineered landfill in Nsawam, a 200-acre facility run by a Jospong Group subsidiary, to receive the waste once evacuation begins.
Trucks are being mobilised nationally; the military has been tasked with securing the cleared site afterward.
That solves the immediate sanitation emergency. It does not answer the more interesting question sitting underneath it. Is a million-tonne waste pile a liability to be trucked away and buried, or a resource that other countries have already learned to convert into cash?
What a tonne of trash is actually worth
Sweden offers the clearest real-world price signal. Its waste-to-energy plants are so efficient that the country now imports foreign garbage to keep them running, nearly three million tonnes in a recent year, for which Sweden was paid roughly 373 kronor per tonne to accept it, on top of the electricity and district heating it then sells to Swedish households.
Earlier in that program’s history, Swedish operators were earning closer to $100 million a year, or roughly $125 a tonne, from the same import-and-burn model. Translated into cedis at today’s exchange rate of about GH₵11.4 to the dollar, a tonne of waste fed into a Sweden-style incineration plant has, at various points, been worth anywhere from roughly GH₵400 to GH₵1,400. Applied, hypothetically, across a million-tonne stockpile, that is a revenue band of roughly GH₵400 million to GH₵1.4 billion, not counting the electricity and heat sold afterward.
That range is illustrative, not a forecast for Jamestown. Sweden’s plants are purpose-built, its waste arrives already source-separated, and its tipping fees reflect a mature European market Ghana does not yet have.
Compost tells a similar story on a different scale. A techno-economic study of Ghana’s own pilot waste-to-energy plant recommended pricing compost output at around €0.19 per kilogram, about GH₵2,400 a tonne at current cross rates, based on a market survey of existing Ghanaian organic fertiliser suppliers.
That is a real, study-verified Ghanaian price for finished compost. What it cannot tell us is how much of Jamestown’s stockpile would actually yield compost, because that depends on how much of the pile is organic material versus plastic, textiles, and construction debris, and nobody has sorted it to find out.
Ghana already has the technology. Not at this scale.
Ghana is not starting from zero. The country’s first waste-to-energy plant, a 400-kilowatt hybrid facility at Gyankobaa in the Ashanti Region, has been running since 2022, funded through a roughly €6.2 million German government contract. It combines solar, biogas and plastic pyrolysis to convert about 12 tonnes of municipal solid waste a day into electricity and bio-fertiliser for local farmers and was designed as a blueprint for ten similar plants around the country.
The gap is scale, not concept. Twelve tonnes a day is roughly what a mid-sized apartment block generates. Jamestown’s stockpile represents decades of accumulation at a national waste-generation rate the Ministry of Local Government puts at about 4,400 tonnes a day, or 1.6 million tonnes a year, of which only around 80% is collected in the first place, and less than 2% is segregated at source.
That last figure is the real bottleneck. Waste-to-energy and composting economics both depend on separating organic material, plastics, metals and inert debris before processing. A mixed, decades-old heap trucked wholesale to a landfill in Nsawam cannot be fed directly into a compost line or an incinerator. It first has to be sorted, and Ghana currently has almost no infrastructure to sort waste at anything like this volume.
Is it too late to recycle it?
Not too late technically, but too late to do cheaply on this particular pile. The minister himself has signalled that the government is thinking beyond simple evacuation; he has said officials want recyclable material properly processed and reused rather than just relocated, and that the government is considering investment in crushing equipment to help young people in the recycling trade process and resell reclaimed materials.
That is the right instinct, but it describes a downstream sorting industry that does not yet exist at scale in Accra, not a switch that can be flipped before the Adipa trucks start rolling next week.
The more useful comparison than Jamestown’s own million tonnes may be the smaller, steadier waste stream Ghana is generating every day regardless of what happens to the historical pile. Zimbabwe’s planned Bulawayo waste-to-energy plant, a $150 million project designed to convert 325 tonnes of solid waste a day into power, is closer in scale to what a city the size of Accra could realistically feed on an ongoing basis than any one-off attempt to reprocess a decades-old heap.
The arithmetic, in the end, cuts against the headline-friendly idea of the Jamestown pile itself as a jackpot. The real money in turning Ghanaian waste into cedis sits not in the million tonnes already accumulated but in building the segregation and processing infrastructure modelled on Gyankobaa, scaled toward what Sweden and Zimbabwe demonstrate is bankable to make sure the next 1.6 million tonnes generated every year never becomes another Jamestown in the first place.
