Port- of-Spain mayor Louis Lee Sing and environmentalists agree that this country needs to shut down landfills and find an alternative to garbage disposal.This comes after a blanket of "toxic smoke" hovered over Port-of-Spain for the fourth consecutive day yesterday.Lee Sing said the corporation was not responsible for the landfill but added that it did dispose of the city's garbage at the site.
He said the fumes and smoke coming from the area were of tremendous concern but not a new issue."We need a modern approach and we need to move from landfills to, maybe, incinerators."Lee Sing said he had raised the issue with former local government minister Chandresh Sharma and the present Local Government Minister, Dr Surujrattan Rambachan."The system I proposed is efficient and eco-friendly. If remnants come out of the incinerator, they can be used to make floor tiles," Lee Sing said.He said the country was not showing enough concern for environmental issues."We seem almost not to care, and I can only conclude that it is out of ignorance."We live in a country where our land resource is limited. We should be concerned with the impact the landfill is having on our coastline and fisheries."
Stephen Harris, director of SAVE ( Secure A Vibrant Environment), an NGO with a mandate of fostering better recycling practices, told the T&T Guardian the smoke in the city was a huge opportunity for Government to look at implementing recycling as an alternative to landfills.He said it is also time for Government to look at how the Green Fund was being utilised.The Green Fund is an environment fund that facilitates grants to organisations and community groups engaged in conservation.The fund currently holds nearly $3 billion and has disbursed just over $1.5 billion."The disbursement of funds from the Green Fund does not match the need for environmental conservation measures," Harris said.
Environmentalist and director of the Papa Bois Conservation group Stephen Broadbridge suggested the way to deal with solid waste could be found externally.He said plastics, metal tins and a host of other materials could be exported and sold."The waste material should not be smoking out our cities. They should be packaged and sent abroad to the countries willing to buy them."
Broadbridge said the Beetham dump had been neglected for a long time."People that scavenge at the dump are at risk but they also create problems. Besides lighting fires, they burn plastics at the side of the road in plain sight."
Broadbridge said the country should not have material to burn in the first place, adding that Beetham was not the only dump creating health risks."We should not have any dump."
The smoke coming from the Beetham landfill is not a singular occurrence.In February, smoke billowed toward the city from the area for several days.Then the Environmental Management Authority (EMA) said the responsibility for the site lay with the Solid Waste Management Company Ltd (SWMCOL).Yesterday, EMA CEO Joth Singh did not answer eight phone calls to his mobile phone.