Debate needed on proposed litter law

NO ONE denies that Zimbabwe faces several challenges with solid waste with litterbugs treating the streets as a garbage bin, people dumping waste in open spaces and wetlands, and local authorities failing to collect garbage regularly.

Emergency measures have had to be used, such as Operation Chenesa Harare, to clear some of the accumulated mountains of litter and garbage, while these deal with the effects of dumping they do not deal with the causes nor the fact that garbage is dumped and litter thrown around in the first place.

So the draft proposals now being written up as a statutory instrument by the Ministry of Environment, Climate, and Wildlife, with a lot of input presumably by the Environmental Management Agency, are designed to move Zimbabwe rapidly into a littler-free country with proper collection and management of solid waste.

However, the outline proposals reported on at the weekend need, in our opinion, a lot more debate and thought to be effective, fair, and practical in solving the problems and accomplishing the goals we should all desire.

On one side these proposals put a lot of pressure on local authorities to take the management of solid waste seriously, drawing up an annual plan and getting this approved through the EMA, and then implementing it. This should help concentrate minds a lot better.

Of course, anyone can draw up plans, but getting them implemented is a different story, but the proposals take that into account, with some serious fines being proposed if a local authority does not do its job.

We then move onto slightly shakier ground. The Ministry is keen on having a central point in every suburb where residents can dump their rubbish. We think that is a good idea, although the dumping needs to be free.

At present the only place in Harare where someone can take a truckload of rubbish is Pomona, and the private company there charges close to US$50 a tonne for anyone bringing in rubbish, which does not encourage this much.

A proper central point would be a major help and where those who now tend to drive out in the middle of the night to dump rubbish in a wetland could legally take it to a proper point. We see no problem in ensuring that rubbish is properly bagged and that options exist for pre-sorting.

However, councils still need to collect rubbish, weekly from residences and daily in business areas.

Vehicle ownership is far from universal despite increasing registrations, and to expect people to carry bags of rubbish several kilometres to the dumping point would be unfair and unjust.

Old people are the least likely to own vehicles, making that unfairness even worse.

Ensuring that all businesses have a proper bin on the pavement outside their premises is long overdue, but it needs to be backed by the local authorities, who need to make sure these bins are emptied at least daily and in high-traffic areas more frequently.

And the laws needed to be backed with anti-vandalism laws; we have all seen street bins severely damaged by vandals.

We then come to anti-littering and anti-dumping laws. These are needed, but they need to be fair to pass muster in the courts. And they need to be enforced. At present most urban authorities have anti-litter by-laws.

Yet we have never heard of anyone being fined. There were complaints that municipal police do not have arresting powers, but surely some sort of exceptions could be made, to at least allow them to force someone to accompany them to a police station.

A combination of plenty of public bins and fining of litterbugs does work. Singapore went from one of the dirtier cities to one where there is simply no litter by ensuring that public bins were plentiful and that police and other law enforcement personnel would arrest and fine those dropping even a cigarette butt.

Singapore litter bins even have an ashtray where cigarettes can be put out.

Part of the proposals is to fine or charge those who allow litter and dumping around their premises. Here potential unfairness is high. If the charged person is doing the littering or the dumping they should be fined or charged, but how can they stop others doing this?

This can be a serious problem. Many proud homeowners make sure that litter on the verges outside their homes is collected, at least weekly in time for the council truck, and sometimes more often.

But it is not their litter. It comes from those passing by, on foot or most irritating driving by and using a car window as a chute for their rubbish. Very few people dump rubbish outside their gates. It is the others, the ones dumping, who need to be fined.

The monthly clean-up day on the first Friday of every month needs to be put in perspective. Cleaning up the environment just once a month is inadequate, it needs to be a continuous exercise.

The monthly campaign, however, has done a lot to highlight the need for keeping the environment clean, involving communities in ensuring a litter-free environment and helping people understand that if you litter someone has to clean up.

To make it compulsory creates a new set of problems. Business must go on, and even the most enthusiastic supporter needs to choose whether to join a neighbourhood or business team.

We agree that there needs to be far more community effort in creating a litter-free environment but feel that much of this effort needs to be on prevention, by seeing the litterbugs caught and fined, and even the clean-up effort needs to be more continuous than one day a month.

Old by-laws and laws, and any new ones, need to hammer the problem at its source, ensuring that people do not litter in the first place and that there are enough public bins, and enough local authority garbage collection, to ensure that there are no excuses.

It is possible to change a culture. Singapore is an example of a country that switched over in a couple of years. But we have one next door that simply never had a litter problem, Namibia.

There is no litter in Namibia, and Namibians are horrified that anyone would throw litter around in public.

Street sweepers keep desert sand off the roads.

Of course all shops have a decent bin outside, garbage trucks are a central priority of local authorities and even the roads department has regularly emptied large bins at lay-bys along the national highways.

We could do the same.