Make garbage collection efficient

THE EDITOR, Madam:

Each time I hear the three-card discussion around garbage collection, which inevitably surrounds personal responsibility, I become agitated and upset. When I pass the St Monica’s Home on Mandela Highway and see at the entrance of a community a skip overflowing with garbage, which from time to time is burnt because it is not cleared. I wonder who took the responsibility to put the garbage there and who did not take the responsibility to remove it.

I recently listened to a discussion about residents in Bog Walk attributing some deaths to leptospirosis caused from rats, whose numbers have gone up because of the pile-up of garbage. The councillor who was participating in the discussion said that he had no problem with garbage collection where he lived and I was bitterly disappointed that the interviewer allowed that to pass without questioning the circumstances. Indeed, where I live I have no problem with garbage collection. I live in a gated community where garbage is collected weekly like clockwork. My helper, on the other hand, tells me in her less affluent community the garbage is collected once every two to three months. I just had to wonder which of these communities would the said councillor would live in. They also spoke to fencing off an area where people were using as a dump. This action they were engaging in was putting a bandage on the wound. All that I’d expect to happen is that persons would find somewhere else to dump the garbage. It is not garbage disposal that is the problem, it is garbage collection, and no amount of spinning will change that.

It is full time the ones responsible for garbage collection stop pussyfooting around and deflecting the impotence of their agency on persons who are disposing of their garbage which they are not collecting. Improve on the collecting of the garbage and I am certain that disposal will be done effectively and efficiently. That is the difference between what happens in various communities.

MARK CLARKE