Seth J. Bokpe's Ghana Newsreel

The Ghana Bauxite Company Limited has incurred the wrath of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for refusing to submit its monthly environmental monitoring data for processing in the 2010 Public Disclosure for Environmental Performance Rating Programme. Ghana Bauxite, the only company in the entire Akoben Programme to have declined the submission of its environmental reports, therefore, faces regulatory actions, including legal proceedings and financial penalties which are not specified by the EPA. Under the Akoben initiative, the environmental performance of mining and manufacturing operations is assessed using a five-colour rating scheme. The colours are gold, green, blue, orange and red, indicating environmental performance ranging from excellent to poor. These ratings measure the environmental performance of companies based on their day-to-day operations once they have successfully cleared their Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and obtained their environmental per...

Users of cheap mobile phones risk being exposed to dangerous radio frequency (RF) radiation with its accompanying more serious health implications than those of telecommunications masts, says Dr Joseph K. Amoako, a research scientist at the Radiation Protection Institute. He said several of the sophisticated-looking fake and cheap phones on the market emit levels of RF radiation far higher than what is globally acceptable as being safe and cautioned against spending a lot of time on such phones. “Averagely, the amount of time we should spend on mobile phones is six minutes, the longer the time you spend on the phone, the higher the exposure to radiation,” he said. According to the Federal Communication Commission (FCA) of the USA, there are two widely accepted RF emission measurements for mobile phone handsets, based on the guidelines set by three major scientific expert bodies — the International Commission of Non-Ionising Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), the National Council on R...