The garbage-disposal regimen for Georgetown and its environs is, it seems, divided between the disposal services afforded by the Georgetown Municipality, on the one hand and private operators, on the other. ‘Which is which,’ so to speak, is unclear though what is clear is that the service continues to be patchy and unreliable in circumstances where one might have expected that given the coronavirus pandemic, some kind of determined effort would have been made to further ‘raise’ our national public health ‘game’ by focusing on an enhanced garbage disposal regime. This, manifestly, has not happened.
There used to be a time, not many moons ago, when City Hall was seen as the Villain of the Piece insofar as much of the coastal garbage disposal challenge was concerned. It had been ‘tagged’ for both ineptitude and corruption. Indeed, the municipality had arrived at a point where it simply seemed unable to cope with the sheer weight of the garbage disposal challenge.
What has attracted less attention than it has warranted is the sickeningly high level of public disregard for where and how garbage is disposed; and while it has to be said that the scrupulous enforcement of an enhanced garbage disposal regime is not the easiest thing to maintain, there is little if any evidence that any serious attempt was ever made to do so, either in the inner city and coastal communities or in the capital.
A great deal has been said and written about the problem but there has never been any serious evidence of a robust campaign to get the various communities and the capital to raise their game insofar as garbage disposal is concerned.
Once the media began to throttle back on their reportage on the garbage disposal situation that problem appeared to grow in its intensity. Such public outcry that had erupted a few years ago appears to have subsided as the citizenry struck a sort of ‘grin-and-bear-it’ posture.
All of this was occurring against the backdrop of an increase in commercial activity and a stepped up level of consumerism which, together, were largely responsible for driving the volume of garbage up. In the midst of this the environmental cautions about the use and disposal of plastics disappeared almost entirely.
Nor, in the face of what were already signs of increased business ‘traffic’ arising out of the oil and gas-related transformations that were occurring has there been any significant attempt to step up the efficiency of our urban garbage-disposal regime. Nowhere, for example, was there evidence of any initiative at the level of either the municipality or government to link a more responsible garbage disposal regime to the various other safeguards that were being recommended as measures deemed to be appropriate in the COVID-19 environment.
There is as well the change in the street vending pattern that has seen an increase in both fruit and vegetable and cooked food vending at roadsides and on parapets, a circumstance that has accounted for a visible increase in indiscriminate garbage disposal. As if this were not enough it would appear that these days, areas of the city have simply been singled out for the indiscriminate dumping of household refuse by persons some of whom, reportedly, actually travel considerable distances from their homes to those makeshift garbage dumps.
Anyone who follows regional and international news reporting will be aware that Guyana has become, arguably, the most talked-about country in the region, a circumstance that is accounted for by the fact that we are now an oil-producing country and that the sheer number of investment potential probes have now gone through the roof. It would, indeed, be no idle boast to say that external interest in Guyana has reached fever pitch.
The problem here is that there is now a disconnect between the external reputation which the country has quickly acquired as a potential investment haven, on the one hand, and the reality of a filthy capital that appears indifferent to what is an unacceptable shortcoming, on the other. Here, it has to be said that a robust lobby for raising the level of our garbage disposal regime has to include the Business Support Organizations (BSO’s) since it is the urban places of business that generate the majority of the refuse in the capital.
Old habits, including those that have to do with indiscriminate garbage disposal, are going to die hard. The further downside of this is that as the inbound traffic of would-be investors, holiday-makers and returning Guyanese come and go, our reputation as a capital, a country that is unmindful of both its appearance and its public health bona fides will continue to grow and that will further downgrade our standing as a country to enjoy.
