How much waste ends up in dump

ABOUT 100 tonnes of waste is managed daily by the Lautoka City Council at the Vunato dump site.

This was revealed by Lautoka City Council health services acting manager Shalend Prem Singh, who highlighted the need for proper waste management.

“With the Lautoka City Council, a survey has revealed that one person generates at least one kilogram of waste per day,” he said.

“For Lautoka City, 54.4 tonnes of waste is being delivered on a daily basis at our municipal council dump site in Vunato. We handle and manage a total of 99.7 tonnes of waste per day. That is a concern for us.”

He said the reason for the increasing amount of waste to the site was the rising population number and lack of waste management practice.

“We are all aware that in Fiji, and Lautoka is no exception, that we are all experiencing rapid growth in all sectors. We are facing increased importation of goods from overseas. We are having increased urbanisation and we are having a lot of developments.

“We are choosing to purchase our food more and more instead of creating our very own backyard gardens.

“All of this leads to increased amounts of waste created by everyone in schools, communities, urban centres and businesses.”

He said individual households should implement more waste management practices.

“We have to look at ourselves and think about what we are doing in terms of waste management.

“What are we doing after we generate waste? Do we simply get rid of them and put them into our rubbish bins? There are solutions that we can implement to help manage our waste.”