Funmi Ogundare
The General Manager, Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency (LASEPA), Dr. Tunde Ajayi, has cautioned the industries to treat their waste water before discharging it to the public drains as their failure to do this may produce chemicals that would be harmful to the ecosystem.
Ajayi made this known, at a one-day capacity building themed, “Effective Operation of Effluent Treatment Plants,” for Effluent Treatment Plant (ETP) operators, maintenance officers, supervisors, quality assurance officers, engineers, environmental consultants, HSE officers, facility managers among others, in the value chain, in collaboration with the Lagos state Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources; and FUMMAN Nigeria Limited.
He expressed concern that some industries push out chemical effluent that may be toxic to the environment, adding that it is their responsibility to adhere to the best global standard practice to safeguard the well- being of the citizenry, protect the environment against further degradation and safety of the ecosystem.
” What we are saying is that they have to treat the waste water to remove the harmful chemicals before sending it to the public drains,” he said.
The training he stated, was to strengthen their capacity for compliance so that when his office goes out on industrial monitoring, they would have been better equipped.
” Overtime, we will make a training like this more robust and make it a prerequisite for people. We traditionally go out for monitoring and enforcement. We do it daily. It is our statutory role and we will continue to engage the industries by updating their knowledge and building their capacity in their field of operations,” the General Manager stated.
The programme, he added, would help industries to design and implement a post production effluent treatment system that would be environmentally friendly and conform with the best practices in other civilised climes.
According to him, ” the state government is very much concerned about the discharge of toxic waste into the environment. Before now, we used to sanction the industries, but we thought of the need to bring them into the system and train them on how to properly treat their industrial waste in a way that will beneficial to the environment.
He recalled that on assumption of office, he took an inspection tour of the state’s industrial areas especially, manufacturing organisations to inspect the way their effluent is being treated as part of the agency’s proactive measures to combat the menace of environmental pollution.
Ajayi stated,” I realised that most of the effluent plants in those manufacturing organisations visited were either not working for mechanical faults or completely abandoned for lack of technical know- how and training on their effective operations “
” What is discharged into the environment, has a lot of impact on the health of Lagosians. There is need for us to monitor and bring the industry into the system so that they will understand what is expected of them. That importance can not be overemphasized and that is the reason for the workshop,” he stressed.
