Two senior officials of the Private Sector Commission (PSC) have launched a scathing attack on what they say is the worsening practice by businesses in the urban commercial sector of dumping garbage on city streets, parapets and in drains and have said that a point has now been reached where the practice should attract the strongest possible legal sanctions.
“Sections of the business community are well on their way to making the city a garbage dump and the practice, distressingly, is going unnoticed by the authorities responsible for managing the city,” Chairman of the Security and Governance Committee of the Private Sector Commission (PSC) Major General (ret’d) Norman Mc Lean told Stabroek Business earlier this week.
Last Tuesday Stabroek Business was invited by Mc Lean to visit several sections of the city where large deposits of refuse had been dumped indiscriminately. Outside the Regent and Wellington streets premises of the Guyoil gas station huge amounts of plastic had been dumped on the roadside. “This is not the work of vendors and passers-by; this is sheer corporate vulgarity,” Mc Lean declared. And the retired Chief of Staff of the Guyana Defence Force told Stabroek Business that the practice raises the question as to whether businesses that demonstrate such flagrant disregard for the environmental security of the capital should be allowed to trade in Georgetown.
Mc Lean, who provided Stabroek Business with pictures of the refuse dumped outside the Guyoil gas station told Stabroek Business that he had already raised the matter with the PSC and that he would insist that “some robust form of action” be taken to bring the PSC’s concerns to the attention of the business community.
Asked about the role of City Hall in arresting the problem Mc Lean said that while he had already contacted the Mayor’s office to formally raise the concern, he was tired of “all of the complexities” associated with municipal management of the city. “I am placing the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the businesses in the city. We cannot ‘mouth off’ about corporate social responsibility without recognizing that part of that responsibility is to dispose of our garbage responsibility,” Mc Lean said.
Meanwhile, PSC Chairman Captain Gerry Gouveia told Stabroek Business that the state of the city was a “reflection of a culture of umindfulness” which he said was a reflection of the state of mind of many of its inhabitants, the people who use it.
“It is clear that some businesses see the city as a kind of public convenience to be abused and left in a filthy state, and that applies particularly to sections of the business community.”
Gouveia and Mc Lean are among the leading private sector advocates of corporate social responsibility and Gouveia told Stabroek Business that he had grown “disgusted of the situation where we sit at seminars and conferences and pay lip service to corporate social responsibility while shamelessly depositing our garbage on the nearest corner.”
Asked whether he shared Mc Lean’s view that harsher penalties should be meted out to transgressors Gouveia said that while he endorsed that view, the solution has to go beyond meting out penalties. “It really is a question of all of us, the PSC, the Georgetown Chamber, and other social organizations and officials of government taking a robust position on the issue. Businesses that dump garbage indiscriminately must be made aware in the strongest possible terms that it is not a socially acceptable practice,” Gouveia said.
Meanwhile Mc Lean told Stabroek Business that a point had now been reached where government should impose an immediate ban on the importation of plastics bottles and styrofoam receptacles. “We no longer need to be educated on the environmental hazards posed by these materials and a total ban on their use would appear to be the only way to salvage the situation”, Mc Lean said.
