Saving the nation from waste!

Few weeks ago, national news reported that the operating theatre at the Gampaha General hospital had to suspend its operations for a number of days because a swarm of flies from the adjacent waste disposal site invaded the operating theatre. This certainly does not reflect well, not only on the Gampaha Municipal Council, but on the whole nation as well for want of an effective mechanism to keep the environment clean. Especially at a time when we pursue economic development with a keen eye on tourism, the country has to keep its cities clean. Further such a state may not augur well for the government’s declared national aspiration of making the Sri Lanka the ‘Wonder of Asia’.

Now that ‘nation sapping conflict’ is a thing of the past, the general Sri Lankan population and the leaders are naturally entertaining sanguine thoughts about the future. Hope and ambition are two necessary ingredients that propel us towards goals in life, be they personal or national, but if we are to realize those goals it is equally necessary that we have a pragmatic approach towards achieving those.

Solid waste management

The waste disposal mechanism of the city is as equally important as the provision of water and electricity to the city because a clean environment is as imperative as clean water and regular electricity. The effects of the former, though long term compared to the latter, could nevertheless be more devastating.

In major cities in the world the cost for solid waste management is high and such costs have been traditionally borne by the public sector but as the situation gets complicated even in the cities in South East Asia like Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok the trend is now for contracting and privatization. In the first place a city’s impression of cleanliness depends on the efficiency of its waste collection system. Singapore has a collection rate of more than 90 percent while in Bangkok, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur the rate is more than 80 percent. Often it is a case where collection services are not being extended to the poor and informal settlements which do not pay or are inaccessible. Thus the poor areas of the city continue in squalor.

However in Colombo the process after collection has always overwhelmed inefficient collection because most of our problems have been in the area of inappropriate dumping of waste. There are four major methods of waste disposal currently in operation in this part of the world. They are, land filling/open dumping, recycling, composting and incineration.

All these four methods have been resorted to by the waste disposals units of major cities but the degree of resorting to one method over the other may necessarily depend on the national requirements and facilities available. For instance, in a city like Singapore the waste is mostly disposed through incineration whereas in Bangkok the popular disposal method is land filling. This is because Singapore needs a more efficient method and its land is limited whereas Bangkok could find enough land to dispose its waste.

Recycling and composting industries

Even in Sri Lanka the most popular method of waste disposal is land filling but in order to minimize the after effects of this method, it should best be coupled with recycling and composting. However both these methods, recycling and composting, are limited in their capacities. In recycling it is only certain materials of waste that can be recycled and in composting it is only the bio-degradable material that can be composed.

The other point in recycling and composting is that the cost of making recycled material and composed fertilizer is often found to be above that of similar items available in the market. This however should not act as a deterrent to recycling and composting waste and it should be the responsibility of the government to subsidize such materials where necessary to insure the viability of those recycling and composting industries. This is because such industries serve the main purpose of facilitating waste disposal. Even in the case of cleaning city drains of polythene waste the local bodies may require government patronage and the cost of such patronage may have to be levied from the polythene industry by way of taxes added to the cost of manufacture.

Cleaner cities

However the main lacuna noticed in the public sector disposal of waste that has been in operation for about a century now is its lack of professionalism. Are our officers and city fathers motivated to sustain and improve on our present waste disposal system? Are we culturally attuned not to compromise with a state of tolerating dirt when faced with extraordinary situations in the operation? Do we as a nation have enough drive to free ourselves from these mountains of dirt, whatever the exigencies that may bring those about?

Thus it is the mental attitude in waste disposal, like in every thing else that is important and in that respect it may be necessary for us to reorient some of these officers to have the right mental attitude. The problem however is that we Sri Lankans traditionally have been post active rather than pro-active in solving our problems. We wait things to happen and wake up only when things have really ‘gone to the pot’. When faced with problems, there is a sense of ‘succumbing to inevitability’ in our national thinking that prevents us from taking control of situations. The people and the leaders in this country certainly have to reverse such passive thinking and adopt a new sense of urgency and practicality more in line with the thinking in countries like Japan, Singapore and China, if we are to realize our dream of having cleaner cities. The strategy directed towards having cleaner cities is like a musical tune, it has to be sung together by all concerned to achieve the right chorus.

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