In the heart of the capital, at the Mandela landfill site, an environmental disaster is waiting to happen and a vital GOG/IDB site rehabilitation and public awareness project has been delayed by a series of administrative blunders.

Up until the close of working hours on Friday, no civil engineering consultant for the supervision of works for a five acre extension at the site had been appointed and no firms have been pre-selected for the public awareness campaign which was due to start this September. The project was given the go-ahead in May 2000.

According to Lennox Caesar, administrative officer for the Environmental Improvement of the Georgetown Interim Dumpsite and Assistant Town Clerk for Georgetown, the sole bid for the civil engineering consultancy has been "misplaced" at the Central Tender Board.

Caesar told Stabroek News on Friday evening that the Tender Board had verbally requested contact information for the sole bidder two weeks ago but had not informed the bidder of the "misplacement".

Chairman of the Tender Board, Neermal Rekha, told Stabroek News on Friday that he was unable to confirm if the bid had been misplaced. "I am not saying I have no knowledge of it," he said in a telephone interview, but stated he would have to check the file before commenting.

When requested to check the file on Friday, he refused. He recommended that the consultancy should go back to re-tender if the bid had been lost.

Caesar remarked that a re-tender would not be possible without IDB approval and may prove too expensive.

"They [Central Tender Board] must formally advise us the tender has been misplaced," he said. "They have not informed the bidder up to now [Friday]. If they write him tomorrow it means that somebody is trying to cover up".

Rekha remarked that a change in the time of submissions for bids for the public awareness campaign meant that a decision could not be made on the tender.

Advertisements in the national press for "Expressions of interest for the conduct of a public awareness and education programme - Inter-American Development Bank Loan - LO-1052 SF/GY" originally stipulated a 2:00 pm deadline on July 31. This was changed to 9:00 am on July 31 two weeks before the deadline.

Caesar said that it had been agreed that any submissions received by the Tender Board after the adjusted deadline and before the original deadline should be allowed. He noted that the deadline was changed on the advice of the Tender Board. No selection has been made.

Methane gas

In the background of this, the Mandela waste site looms. The environmental clock is ticking.

Two hundred and fifty tonnes of waste a day are dumped onto the site that has next to none of the requirements of a safe dumpsite. Fires can ignite at any time and last for days on end. Methane gas is slowly building up from decomposition.

An area that was intended as a pilot site to train students in waste management has become the country's main landfill site. The five-acre extension that was intended to come online with the GOG/IDB project following approval 18 months ago was intended to extend the life of the site for 18 months.

There is no effective system in place to deal with the plastic waste whose volume swamps the site. Nearly half of the pile is organic, degradable waste that slowly decomposes, releasing methane into the heart of the rubble.

The site is not lined. Any run off goes into the surface water.

Around about 50 waste pickers scour the site unorganised and scavenger-like. They make a minimum of $2,000 a day. An undisclosed number of persons live there.

On the streets and open areas of the country, an environmental disaster is happening. Littering has become second nature. Dumping of anything from market waste to old cars is occurring without restraint.

Waterways are blocked. Drainage is hindered. Rats and dogs feast on bones and mouldy bread. Homeless souls rip open rubbish sacks and pull out what they can, discarding anything uninteresting onto the streets.

Littering with abandon

It's been said a thousand times. The Garden City has become the Garbage City.

"People are littering with abandon," Mayor Hamilton Green remarked. "We did not prepare for this onslaught", he told Stabroek News.

There's a limited space to put the waste. A waste flood is ebbing. So what is being done to alleviate the problem on a wider scale, beyond the Mandela fiasco?

On a basic level, there have been efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to alert people to solid waste management and littering. You might have seen the television commercials calling for an end to throwing cartons out of minibuses. It has made some impression.

Nonetheless, this campaign has not made huge inroads into solving the behavioural problem. People are still tossing plastic bottles into the drains and dumping garbage where it is forbidden.

Speaking on behalf of the EPA, Sharefa Razack, is well aware of the limitations.

"Environmental awareness is new in Guyana," she said. "Persons are still not very responsive to education activities.

"Our problem is our mindset and I have doubts about the effectiveness of the media in Guyana in environmental education.

"The difficulty in raising awareness is that you really don't have the system to back up what it is you are telling people to do," she said.

"The collection system, especially in the regional areas, is practically non-existent," she continued. "Will education really work if you don't have the systems in place?"

It's all well and good encouraging people to not throw litter into the road but if there isn't a waste bin in the street, what are you going to do with that banana skin?

"Where it is successful, people have systems in place," Razack emphasised.

"Local government has to move aggressively in terms of getting solid waste management in place," she said. "What is local government's priority?"

According to the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Local Government, Pulandar Kandhi, new potential sites are being investigated. But time is running out.

Prospective sites

A number of sites across the country have been mooted as prospective landfill sites, including Eccles, Omai and Linden. Despite a number of feasibility studies and touting of progress, IDB representative Gordon Lewis confirmed that no site has been decided on. A source at the EPA bemoaned the tendency to do feasibility studies but not acting on them.

The world remembers well the collapse of the mass landfill site near Manila in the Philippines last year. One hundred squatting huts were destroyed leaving close to 100 scavengers dead and almost a thousand homeless. Although Mandela Avenue is not 'home' to many, scavengers and waste pickers use it. Overfull landfills are dangerous, unstable places. Even worse, the site is not lined, meaning any run-off is not contained and can escape to surface waters in the area.

Beyond this, what Kandhi terms "irresponsible and indiscriminate dumping" continues across the nation making Guyana less and less attractive to investors, residents and tourists.

Who is responsible for this? Is it government? Is it the EPA? Is it the police? Is it you and I?

"The responsibility should be shared," Kandhi remarked.

"We have to convince them that solid waste is their problem," Razack remarked, referring to the National Democratic Councils and the public. "The EPA isn't in a position to take on that kind of responsibility."

"Most of the city's collection operations are contracted out," remarked Caesar. "We have what you would call a supervisory responsibility.

"But I want to say emphatically that we have one of the best collection systems in place now than we previously have," he said.

The problem, however, is not directly how the waste is collected but what happens to it afterwards.

Scavengers

Rufus Lewis is manager of the Mandela landfill site.

"We receive about 250 tonnes of waste a day," he said.

According to Lewis and Caesar, the site can handle domestic waste and pathological waste (animal carcasses, etc) but cannot take building waste.

Of the waste at the site, 4.2% is glass and 4.5% is paper. Of those totals, private companies recycle around 80% after sorting by waste pickers. This arrangement is largely unofficial.

"They're doing it with the tacit support of the City Council," Caesar explained, "because were we to leave all that waste there by now we would have had to declare Mandela an environmental disaster."

This environmental disaster stage is nearing as the waste mound gets higher and as long as no consultant for supervising the vital extension is appointed.

"Since the early 50s, we incinerated all of our waste," he continued. "But then the incinerator became problematic. The search for a new landfill site began in 1994."

Seven years on there is no replacement and a delayed project to extend the existing site. Caesar describes the incinerator as now "virtually non-functional."

"We still use it but that exposes the neighbouring communities and our employees to hazards," he said.

So how much can the Mayor and City Council (M&CC) do? According to Lewis, 15% of the council's budget is allocated to collection, treatment and disposal of solid waste. Around about $200 million is spent keeping an old beast breathing.

Both Caesar and Lewis believe that is a fraction of what is required for proper waste management. Lewis estimated that a figure of $1 billion a year would be more realistic for a "holy trinity" management scheme involving recycling, incineration and well-organised landfills.

Lewis explained that the condition of the site is made worse by waste brought in from outside the jurisdiction of the City Council.

Plastics

There is a huge transient population that comes to Georgetown on a daily basis, leaving most of its waste behind to be shovelled onto the landfill.

Green estimated that almost as much waste as is collected from Georgetown is coming in from outside the city limits.

"It's a very troubling situation," he said.

Mandela is rapidly nearing that disaster stage. The increase in importation of plastics is compounding the problem. Plastic does not go away in a hurry. Worse, it takes up a lot space. Despite only around eight per cent of waste being plastic, the volume is much more significant.

"It is right to say we should ban plastics," Caesar said. "But how realistic is that in a world where we're going more and more into plastics as a lighter and somewhat cheaper form of packaging.

"While we are advocating for a limit on the amount of plastics coming into the country, we will have to devise a mechanism which can deal with the influx of plastics."

"I'm not sure that there has been any place where recycling plastics has been cost effective," remarked Lewis. He is hoping that some private investor or NGO may come to the rescue. Most plastic recycling schemes involve some kind of taxation or fee to pay for the process.

"The government has introduced an environmental tax for all plastics imported but what percentage of that tax comes to the City Council?" Caesar queried rhetorically.

"I am not afraid to tell you it's nil," he quipped. "Government collects the environmental tax, the City Council gets none of it and we are saddled with the responsibility.

"Central government should see it as a duty to pass over a percentage of that," he said. "There is need for more collaboration."

There is also need for more effective public awareness campaigns, both the public mindset and the capacity of the current waste management systems have to change.