The Ministry of Communities will be providing the Georgetown Mayor and City Council (M&CC) with $100M to open a new cell at the Haags Bosch Sanitary Landfill.
The decision was made public at Monday’s statutory council meeting at City Hall and comes in wake of a fire that left Cell 1 at the site no longer fit for use.
Stabroek News has learnt that a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has been signed between the city and the ministry to utilise the funds for the opening and operationalising of a new cell as well as the complete closure of the Mandela dumpsite and rehabilitation of the Le Repentir Cemetery in the vicinity of the dumpsite.
In an interview with Stabroek News, M&CC Solid Waste Director Walter Narine explained that although a fire that burned for three weeks within Cell 1 at the Haags Bosch site has been extinguished, the cell is no longer fit for use.
“The cell which was burning has to be sealed off; it can’t be used again because there is a lot of burnt/smouldering refuse there, so if we put new stuff there, chances are it will catch. So part of the $100M is to open a new cell,” Narine said.
The fire, which began on December 20, 2015, consumed approximately 12 hectares of garbage and saw the Haags Bosch site being temporarily closed. Garbage trucks were redirected to the Lusignan landfill, while the M&CC had initially established a temporary landfill in the Le Repentir Cemetery to cater for refuse generated from the markets in the city during the Christmas season. This decision was reversed after Stabroek News reported that all the garbage from the East Coast, Georgetown and the East Bank of Demerara was being dumped at Le Repentir as a result of the poor condition of the Lusignan main road, which rendered the site there inaccessible.
After a meeting between representatives of the Ministry of Communities and the M&CC, a decision was taken to immediately open a temporary holding site at Haags Bosch and repair the Lusignan main road.
Steps were also taken to put long term solid waste measures in place. One such measure is the MoU, which will see experts at the Ministry and City Hall collaborating to construct and manage a semi-aerobic (Fukuoka) landfill.
Narine explained that the project is partly the result of recommendations made after he and others attended a training programme in Japan in October and November of last year. Also present at the training programme was Project Director of Georgetown Solid Waste Management Programme Gordon Gilkes and a staffer of the Ministry of Communities.
It is expected that the combined expertise and equipment available will facilitate the creation and management of a “proper landfill cell,” Narine said.
“We will be excavating, laying a geotextile lining to prevent leaching, putting in collection pipes to take the leachate to a pond where it will be treated, tested and released, once sufficiently safe. We will also be inserting methane gas vents to allow for the collection of that gas, which may be utilised for energy generation,” he further explained.
The Haags Bosch facility, which is designed to have four cells, each with a life-span of 10 years, was built to cater for 250 tonnes of waste per day. In 2012, it was reported that the facility was in fact receiving an average of 350 tonnes of waste on a daily basis. This reality is expected to severely limit the lifespan of each cell.
In June of last year, it was reported that the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) which in 2007 signed a US$18.07M loan agreement with Guyana for the project, had threatened to withdraw its involvement. The Ministry of Communities has explained that this stance resulted from non-compliance in several areas by contractor BK International.
According to a press release from the ministry, these included “the absence of a treatment abatement lagoon, a landfill gas management systems and the application of a daily cover to the landfill.” Additionally, the release said “soil excavated from several locations on site, intended for use as daily cover, was diverted, with the agreement of the executing agency, to another location for use not related to landfill management.”
The project was initially conceptualised to be managed by the Georgetown municipality but is now being managed by central government since it was expanded to include several Neighbourhood Democratic Councils on the East Coast and East Bank Demerara as well as three on the West Bank Demerara.
The new MoU will see at the municipality returned to managing the space at least partially as it collaborates with the ministry.
The rest of the $100M will be used to close off the Le Repentir landfill once and for all.
“There are still different pockets of smoke. I observed at least seven pockets on my last visit, we have to cover that. We will be de-bushing, repairing the drains and access road. There is supposed to be access from Mandela straight to Cemetery and we will be returning that road to its previous state,” Narine explained.
