Waste poses threat to public health

 

The Guanapo Landfill may be seriously affecting agriculture as well. Earthwise Trinidad Limited has filmed the Manacai River, a water course that runs through the Ministry of Agriculture Research Division in Centeno, Mausica. The river was once used to irrigate the Ministry’s cocoa plants; Centeno is the home of the world’s gene bank of cocoa species and ground-breaking cocoa research has come out of this facility. But the Manacai River is now blackened, nearly lifeless, as footage on the Earthwise Web site shows. The site is careful to place a disclaimer about its members’ lack of scientific expertise on matters of water pollution. But they believe the Guanapo Landfill, along with other industrial factors, has caused this serious change to the health of the Manacai.

 

Hazardous waste

SWMCOL does ban certain types of refuse from the Guanapo Landfill: car tyres, biomedical waste, and carcasses (both animal and human). But at the JSC, Oudit mentioned that she herself had seen hospital trucks dumping biomedical waste into the landfill. Guardian Media reporters also found some banned substances among the garbage that made up the landfill mountain, like remnants of animal carcasses and medical needles. Scavengers no longer fear these items, but they can add another dimension to the type of pollutants that are contaminating the water supply—that of hazardous waste. Hazardous waste is solid waste that because of its chemical or physical characteristic or its concentration, may pose significant risks to public health. 

 

During the JSC session, SWMCOL general manager Uchie Osuji defended these security breaches: “We are trying to secure a site that is not fenced, that we don’t own. We are trying to secure a site as a public company that is not an authority. So we don’t have anything legislative that gives us the teeth to do what we need to do.” Still, the company is tentatively making a way forward. According to SWMCOL’s corporate communications specialist Alison Awai, plans for the landfill involve eventual closure. When asked about how SWMCOL plans to minimise or eliminate the leaking leachate, she wrote in an e-mail interview: “Regular periodic monitoring was routine in the past. Studies were conducted. “Present intent is to address this component via pre-closure rehabilitation with monitoring. Even after any abrupt closure consideration, leachate will continue to be generated; therefore addressing this is a must especially within the context of post-closure land use and off-site pollution potential.”

 

The ordinary citizen may think any empty, isolated chunk of land far away from residential areas can be a landfill. But good solid waste landfills are actually complicated engineering feats. Osuji argued that finding and establishing a new dump site is “a whole journey.” “You have to get your conceptual design, get that passed; get your EMA (Environmental Management Authority) approvals, get approvals from the residents and all that entails,” he explained. Osuji added that any new landfill site without Guanapo’s physical qualities will have to be engineered; and that poses a huge financial hurdle to overcome, especially since waste management has not been properly funded and supported by successive administrations since the 1980 Master Plan, he said. A development agency that SWMCOL approached for funding summed up the issue best in their refusal. “Waste management is not a priority by your government,” Osuji quoted.

 

Leachate facts

 

Leachate is a black “juice” produced during the decomposition of solid waste.  It is supposedly seeping out of the dump and onto the surface and into underground water supplies.

 

Guidelines