It appears a suitable site for relocation of the Riverton City dump is yet to be located, but Executive Director of the National Solid Waste Management Agency (NSWMA), Audley Gordon, is assuring that one is being actively pursued.
Gordon said this was one of the task assigned to a nine-member enterprise team, which is headed by Lyttleton Shirley. The team was announced by Prime Minister Andrew Holness in 2016, after a series of fires at the site drew national attention. The team was mandated to see to the divestment of the property.
But Gordon noted during Monday’s formalisation of a partnership between the NSWMA and Hardware & Lumber Limited (H&L) to provide 2,400 drums annually for the containerisation of garbage, that he has not heard of a location being found.
“I will say to you, I doubt that they have, but I don’t know because I am not following the enterprise team in that great detail,” he said.
Gordon said it is not easy to locate such a site, since nobody would want a dump close to their residence.
“The water table in Jamaica in most cases is very high. There is hardly anywhere you go and you can dig six feet and you don’t find water; you don’t even have to reach six feet in some cases. So it is very difficult to identify a suitable area that you can put a landfill the size of Riverton,” he said.
“You don’t just find 100-and-odd acre of land every day waiting to put a landfill on; and when you do find it, by the time the water resource people check it, by the time NEPA (National Environment and Planning Agency), by the time all the different minds and geology people check it, you might can’t use it,” he told The Gleaner.
Founder of the Jamaica Environment Trust, Diana McCaulay, does not believe enough effort is being placed in finding a new site. She said it is not certain who is responsible for finding another location.
“I don’t think the [enterprise] team was charged with any responsibility to find an alternative site, so what I want to know is, who has been diligently searching very, very enthusiastically for an alternate site,” she said.
She said persons generally do not want a dump near them because of the poor management of these sites.
Gordon said that a location has been found in Trelawny for a transfer station, where waste can be sorted. He said work has started towards getting the requisite approvals and there has been site mapping, but funding to continue the project is an issue. A state-of-the-art transfer station can cost as much as $600 million.
The pandemic, he noted, has also affected the Government’s ability to fund several projects that were slated to come on stream to assist in improving garbage collection. One such project is a Gully Bank initiative, which is aimed at keeping garbage out of gullies to reduce flooding.
“That was an approved programme, money was identified, and the finance minister himself spoke in Parliament about that. That was a combined package that the Government had, which includes 100 trucks, a gully programme, and a town centre programme in May Pen. Then came COVID-19 and the Government had to then begin their realignment of priorities, and so that was deferred,” he said.
McCaulay noted that several of these initiatives were announced long before COVID-19. The establishment of a transfer station, she said, was announced more than a decade ago.
“We just talk about these things and we don’t do them; and every time there is a fire, there is a new slew of promises and then the fire gets put out, [and] things go quiet,” she said.
Gordon insisted that some initiatives have been launched in recent times that have been successful. One such is a pilot project to separate plastic in 16 communities. More than 94,000 pounds of plastics have already been secured, and consideration is being given to double the number of communities with a view to have the project replicated across Jamaica by 2023.
Yesterday’s formal signing of an agreement between H&L and the NSWMA for the donation of 2,400 drums annually is valued at $1.5 million per year. The project, which has been dubbed the ‘Drum a di gate’ initiative, is primarily aimed at ensuring the containerisation of waste, especially in densely populated communities.