CWSA to clamp down on dumping in city

A number of business places around Kingstown may be guilty of contributing to the garbage problem in the city, says a Central Water and Sewerage Authority (CWSA) official.{{more}}

Joan Ryan, the Public Relations and Marketing Manager of the CWSA, in an interview with SEARCHLIGHT on Tuesday, January 25, said that some entrepreneurs are not making the disposal of their garbage a business priority, and that this is cause for serious concern for all businesses.

“I think (business) people, when they are trying to cut corners and save money, the area that they will cut is the area of managing their solid waste.”

“When somebody has a business, they don’t understand that waste management is an integral part of that business,” she added.

“If you have a restaurant or salon or whatever, and you keep throwing your garbage at the outside of the restaurant, what’s gonna happen? As long as the garbage is not properly disposed of, the pests (roaches and rats) are going to be a problem for you and the other businesses in the area… it’s going to be bad for business.”

Ryan pointed out that a number of locations around Kingstown were identified by CWSA field officers as areas that are being used as dumping grounds for business owners.

These include but were not limited to the area across from Her Majesty’s Prisons, where she indicated that a garbage receptacle owned by the Kingstown Town Board was removed from its original location and is being abused.

Another area highlighted was around the Y De Lima/ Bonadie’s Supermarket area in Middle Street; in the vicinity of the Cambridge Building on Grenville Street, and sacks of coconut shells in the ‘Little Tokyo’ area.

“We have not been able to determine who is responsible for throwing the garbage currently, but it is really bad,” Ryan said.

According to Ryan, the law states that business places and vendors in Kingstown are responsible for the disposal of their own garbage, and are not supposed to leave their waste for removal by the Solid Waste Management Unit.

Businesses and individuals caught dumping garbage illegally and littering could be prosecuted by law.

She said that suggestions had been made in the past to entrepreneurs on ways to dispose of their garbage.

“I want to point out that twice the CWSA put an offer for coconut vendors; a service at our sewerage depot in Kingstown, where at the end of the work day the vendors would bring their coconut shells and deposit them in our bins for a minimal cost of about five dollars, and they refused to use that service.”

“We have said to the small business: ‘If you are unable on your own, come together and have somebody at the end of the business day to remove your garbage for you’.

Still we have a problem where persons would bring their garbage out of their business at the end of the work day and put it on the ground for the Solid Waste Unit to remove it on evenings.”

Ryan said that the overwhelming amount of garbage being dumped on the city’s streets, as well as the ever present problem of littering, has caused her institution to engage in a two-year programme to bring awareness to the problem.

These include visits to schools by their mascot ‘Gabby’, radio programmes, and special exercise during Water Week (March 21 -25) and Earth Day (April 22).

“The whole issue of littering and waste disposal and how it makes St. Vincent and the Grenadines unsightly is a big problem and we want to attack it,” Ryan noted.