Trash floats down the river
the Tonle Sap is not new, said another local woman who also asked to be identified only by her given name, Net. “It’s been going on for six to seven years,” Net said. “I want the government to take action . . . We want the garbage trucks to come here.”
Sitting just a few metres away from the huge pile of rubbish yesterday morning, Srey Da added: “The trash just floats away.”
Trash-collection contractor Cintri does, in fact, maintain a pick-up site in the area, but it’s about 500 metres away, up an intermittently paved incline leading away from the bank. According to Srey Da, it’s just “easier” to throw waste into the water.
“Sometimes when Cintri comes, we don’t even know, because it’s unpredictable,” noted another resident, Sem Yan, who maintained that she burned her trash rather than dumping it into the water.
Fellow resident Ter Chantorn said the road leading to the pickup point became almost impassable when it rained, but maintained that she, too, would “gather the trash every day and burn it” rather than dump it.
However, one bystander, who asked to be identified only as Theng, wasn’t convinced. When asked, locals often deny tossing their garbage in the water, but only to avoid taking responsibility for the problem, he said.
“It’s not an appropriate thing to do,” said Theng, who comes to the village frequently on business. “It’s ongoing.”
Officials, however – much as when confronted with outrage over theWater Festival video two days earlier – appeared reluctant to take responsibility for the situation in Chbar Ampov.
City Hall spokesman Mean Chanyada said he wasn’t aware of the problem, but would “inform experts in that area to go take a look at the issue”.
He noted that a contract was recently signed with Cintri to expand coverage in Chbar Ampov district, but declined to comment on why certain parts of the district had seemingly been neglected.
Cintri’s Khieu Vuthy, meanwhile, declined to comment on the matter. Chbar Ampov District Governor Eng Sipahl said he was too busy to talk about the issue yesterday.
Va Sim Soriya, spokesman for the Ministry of PublicWorks and Transport, would only maintain that the issue was the responsibility of Cintri and City Hall.
“The ministry delegated this responsibility to the municipality and the Department of Public Works,” he said.
Multiple attempts to reach Sam Piseth, director of the Department of Public Works, were unsuccessful, and he did not respond to a message.
According to Environment Minister Say Samal, many cities across the country have begun decentralising waste management to the district level in accordance with a sub-decree adopted last year. However, Phnom Penh, by far the nation’s largest city, has so far failed to do so, he added.
“Phnom Penh’s administration has not done that,” he said, adding that such decentralisation was “crucial” to offering effective service.
Meanwhile, the trash heap in Derm Sleng is going nowhere – and neither is the garbage that spills off of it and flows downstream, according to Wayne Phillips, a lecturer at the Ecology Science Division at Mahidol University in Thailand.
While the immediate impact of dumping trash into the river was aesthetic, he said, as the water carries the garbage downstream, the problem only changes form.
“As more plastic is discarded into the environment, it accumulates ,creating all sorts of problems,” he said. “Once in the river, if the plastic does not sink, it will float and be carried downstream to effect downstream ecosystems like mangrove forests, coral reefs and the productive delta.”
And once it makes its way into the environment, “plastic becomes a local, regional and international problem”, he said.