Talking nothing but rubbish: a clean town is a healthy town
This letter is a request to Bitou Municipality, the Ratepayers Association, and Plett Tourism to put heads together and find a solution to the problem of illegal rubbish dumps.
Bitou Municipality is doing a good job in keeping the town and the taxi-rank, the beaches, and wealthier suburbs clean. From time to time there may be hiccups, but we must praise the effort. The old dump has been closed and waste is better managed than ever before.
The biggest problem now is illegal dumps, which are out of control and a great concern as they are widespread, a health and environmental hazard, unpleasant to see, and a blot on our collective attitude to caring for our citizens.
The wash from them when it rains ends up in our sea and lagoons. The flies, odours, and insects spread disease. The photos here show a New Horizons dump, where even dead dogs are found among the rubbish. Constitutionally, they are a crime!
Why do they arise? Perhaps rubbish collection is infrequent or the bins are too small or perhaps
there are no bins. Perhaps people do not want to keep the rubbish outside their house bin or no bin. Clearly, something must be done.
Our problems also seem to lie in the lack of funds for waste management; refuse trucks are expensive, so might skips be cheaper? If skips were removed as soon as full, would people use them or just carry on throwing their rubbish in the street?
Perhaps skips on a contract basis instead of more trucks and a slogan such as ‘You skip it – we dump it’?
An education programme would also be a great help to teach people about the health and environmental dangers of dumping rubbish.
The Department of Environment and Tourism has issued a booklet entitled ‘Working with Waste’, which gives guidelines on waste collection in high density and under-serviced areas. This is well worth reading (find it on their website).
Please help address this problem by talking ‘rubbish’ to your councillor and pushing for a big clean-up and a new refuse removal system in Bitou.