A stinking failure

The forceful – and some would say shameful – removal of protestors at the Meethotamulla garbage deposit site not only raises serious questions over Sri Lanka’s civil freedoms to protest, but also policy oversights in dealing with a festering garbage disposal system.

After days of tension between the Colombo Municipal authorities and a large number of residents, most of them poor, the Police obtained a Court order and forcefully removed the protestors. Pictures of Police manhandling women and even knocking down an elderly woman were freely printed, but received little open censure from the public and certainly no repercussions for the CMC.

Perhaps the main reason for this is that the public views these garbage sites as “necessary evils”. But environmentalists feel differently and point out that policy failures of successive governments have exacerbated the problem to a stinking level. Basically, the reason the garbage problem is this bad is because of CMC inefficiency rather than the volume of refuse.

Centre for Environmental Justice Executive Director Hemantha Withanage believes that there are an estimated 58 unmanaged waste dumps in the Western Province alone, most of which are almost filled to capacity. As these dumps continue burning, it creates many health problems too.

Seven hundred metric tons of garbage generated in the early ’90s in the Colombo metropolitan area has now quadrupled. At the national level, more than 40,000 tons of hazardous waste is being produced per annum. Solid and hazardous waste is unloaded into open dumps, causing serious health hazards and burnt in the open air where they cause land and water pollution. During the last two decades, dumping destroyed almost all the wetlands around Colombo. Animals die chocking on garbage and citizens protesting are brutally hauled off by Police. Clearly this situation needs to change.

Withanage observes that although a waste management policy has been in the hands of the Environment Ministry since 1996, it is yet on hold. Due to this failure, no systematic waste collection is available in Sri Lanka. Those who collect material for reuse have been discouraged by the Government as there is no policy implementation. Even newspaper is being imported as wrapping paper. Except for a few items, there is no glass bottle collection in the country. All glass bottles in the bottling industry have been converted to Plastic (PET) bottles. Paper or cement bags are not collected as there is no market for them due to the use of shopping bags.

The Hazardous Waste Regulation approved in the ’90s has still not seen the light of day. Further, there are no regulations or standards for disposal of used electronic items and waste. Local authorities claim they have no money, with successive budgets paying scant attention to funds needed for effective garbage disposal systems.

Law suits against offending companies, World Bank loans for better management of municipality dump sites, promotion of recycling and domestic waste disposal through compost making are all tested and failed methods in Sri Lanka. Yet these ideas have taken root and flourished elsewhere in the world.

Despite Sri Lanka’s oft-boasted high literacy rate, people continue to be unaware of their responsibilities regarding garbage. The new wave of supermarkets and conspicuous consumption is not helping as they add substantially to polythene consumption and environmental pollution. Sri Lanka’s new money spinner, tourism, is heavily dependent on a clean environment and simple health reasons are sufficient motivation. But it would seem that most people and the Government are content to let a few hundred poor families bear the results of their own shortcomings.