The ef­fort by St Joseph MP Ter­rence Deyals­ingh to ur­gent­ly de­bate the Beetham land­fill fires un­der Stand­ing Or­der 12 was de­nied by Deputy Speak­er Nela Khan on Fri­day, but it re­mains a ma­jor is­sue in the pub­lic mind.It's in­tol­er­a­ble that Port-of-Spain, the na­tion's cap­i­tal city, should be shroud­ed in tox­ic smoke for much of last week. That alone should en­cour­age high lev­el gov­ern­ment ur­gency to ad­dress the over­due mat­ter of na­tion­al waste dis­pos­al.

It isn't even clear whether the agree­ment by the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA) and Sol­id Waste Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny Ltd (SWM­COL) that the Beetham dump should be closed is go­ing to be en­forced, since the site re­mained in use last week by peo­ple who were not go­ing to the oth­er two in­de­pen­dent en­ti­ties al­so on the 200-acre site.

It's al­so clear that send­ing garbage trucks off to the oth­er ma­jor dump sites at Gua­napo, For­res Park or even Gua­napo may solve the im­me­di­ate prob­lem, but the is­sues that chal­lenge prop­er waste dis­pos­al in T&T re­main both well known and painful­ly elu­sive.

In a per­cep­tive col­umn in Sat­ur­day's Guardian, Pao­lo Ker­na­han makes the point that any ef­fort at re­cy­cling will ul­ti­mate­ly on­ly be suc­cess­ful on a per­son­al lev­el. Peo­ple must make the de­ci­sion to sep­a­rate their waste and to pack­age it prop­er­ly for any sys­tem of re­cy­cling rub­bish to work.But the state must al­so play its part in in­sti­tut­ing sys­tems that prop­er­ly sup­port and mon­e­tize the process so that the flow of dis­card­ed ma­te­ri­als is shift­ed from mounds of garbage in­to raw ma­te­ri­als for re­pro­cess­ing.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers