Laboma Beach Demolition: Ghana Is Burying Millions In Waste – Kojo Akoto Boateng

On Sunday, September 13, soldiers of the 48 Engineer Regiment rolled into Laboma Beach in La. Within hours, the Pink Flamingo Lounge and several other beachfront businesses were reduced to rubble. Today, October 2, the same exercise reached La Pleasure Beach.

The reason is clear. These structures were sitting in the buffer zone of the Kpeshie Lagoon, land that was once mangrove and wetland. Occupants were given a 21-day notice by the Greater Accra Regional Security Council in August. After the devastating floods we have seen, clearing our waterways is a legitimate priority. I have no quarrel with that.

My quarrel is with how we execute the Laboma Beach demolition.

Those businesses were built with steel, roofing sheets, glass, aluminium, timber, tiles, plumbing and electrical fittings. Watch the videos from the site. Almost all of it went down in one mixed heap. The Laboma Beach demolition is not the first. Across Accra and other cities, we have done this again and again, as if a building has no value left in it. That is simply not true.

Every building is a store of materials. The steel was mined, smelted and shipped. The glass and aluminium were imported with scarce dollars. The timber came from our forests. The cement and stone came from quarries that scar our hills. All of that money and energy is locked inside the structure.

In sustainability science, we call this urban mining: treating the built environment as a material bank. Instead of digging new pits, we recover what is already above ground. A smart city does not just demolish. It deconstructs.

Globally, construction and demolition waste makes up at least 30% of all solid waste. About 90% of that comes from demolition, not new construction. Roughly 35% of it ends up in landfills, even though about 75% still has value that could be recovered.

A reinforced concrete building leaves between 805 and 1,371 kg of waste for every square metre of floor. That means a modest 100 sqm beach lounge can leave 80 to 137 tonnes of debris. Multiply that across the Laboma Beach demolition and every demolition site in Ghana and the numbers are staggering.

In 2024 alone, Ghana spent about $527 million importing iron and steel, plus $364 million on iron and steel products. That is close to $900 million in one year. Iron and steel was our sixth largest import. Yet we crush rods, beams and roofing sheets in our own cities and send them to the dump during exercises like the Laboma Beach demolition.

What could we have saved?

Steel from columns, roofs and gates can be reused or fed to our local steel recyclers. Timber from trusses, doors and frames can go back into roofing, furniture and formwork. Glass and aluminium from windows and shopfronts can be reused or recycled at high value. Concrete and blocks can be crushed into aggregate for roads, backfill and new blocks. Sinks, tiles, doors, pipes and wiring can be resold directly.

Our scrap dealers and second-hand building material markets at places like Agbogbloshie already prove that Ghanaians understand reuse. What we lack is a system.

Here is what we must do before the next Laboma Beach demolition happens elsewhere:

1. Audit before we demolish. List what materials are in the structure and what can be saved.

2. Give owners a salvage window. Let them remove roofing, doors, windows and fittings. It also reduces the human pain. If they don’t, let’s have salvage teams do it under police protection.

3. Deconstruct in sequence. Fittings first, then roofing and timber, then glass and metal, and only then the masonry.

4. Sort on site. Mixed rubble is waste. Sorted material is stock.

5. Crush concrete, don’t dump it. Mobile crushers can turn rubble into road aggregate right on site.

6. License salvage operators. Assemblies and agencies should partner with registered salvage and recycling firms under clear safety rules.

7. Put it in policy. The Works and Housing ministry, the EPA and our assemblies should make salvage and waste diversion a condition for every demolition, public or private.

Done right, demolition becomes an industry. Young people can be trained as deconstruction crews. Small businesses can run salvage yards, crushing plants and resale outlets. Builders get cheaper materials. Low-income families get affordable doors, roofing and blocks.

There is a climate dividend too. Every tonne of steel or cement we reuse is a tonne we don’t have to produce or import. Less debris in our drains also means less flooding next rainy season, which is the very reason for these exercises.

Ghana does not lack materials. We lack the habit of seeing value in what we already have.

The next time a structure must come down, let us ask one question first: what can we save? Our cities are mines. Let’s stop sending them to the landfill.

And we can use 48 and 49 Engineers to do this. The same team demolishing can deconstruct.

Source: Kojo Akoto Boateng