Hollow symbolism 

Megapolis and Western Development Minister Champika Ranawaka spent Sunday morning cleaning up parts of Colombo and calling on the public to support the separation of garbage under a new Municipal Council policy. But with no clear date on when Sri Lanka will have a recycling plant or a national policy for its waste, the Minister’s effort is clearly pointless as Government policies remain a smelly disappointment. 

For many months garbage disposal has become an acute problem but the Government is still dragging its feet in building recycling plants with policymakers indicating it will take at least another two years. This is simply unacceptable.   

Ostensibly the Megapolis Ministry has taken it upon itself to partially resolve the garbage problem with three projects. One is to shift the garbage dump in Muthurajawela to Aruwakkaru in Puttalam but the project awaits approval from wildlife authorities.

 A second project to recycle refuse at the Karadiyana Piliyandala garbage dump has been identified and awaits Cabinet approval. The Government is also expecting fresh tenders to recycle garbage collected from Gampaha and Colombo in general as the third project but all this will take time and barely scratches the surface of the problem. 

Environmentalists believe 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 tonnes of garbage generated in the early ’90s in the Colombo metropolitan area has now quadrupled. At the national level, more than 40,000 tonnes 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 died choking on garbage and citizens protesting were brutally hauled off by Police. 

Environmentalists charge 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 the 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.

Lawsuits against offending companies, World Bank loans for better management of municipality dump sites, the 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. 

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.