THE COUNTRY is getting cleaner – seemingly, but there are still too many illegal dump sites in the interior of the island.
This from one of the coordinators of this year’s Clean Up Barbados campaign, Nicole Garofano, who said that the garbage and litter collected this year was less than in 2009.
Just over eight tonnes of garbage were removed by approximately 800 volunteers from schools, community groups, service organisations, businesses, the Barbados Defence Force and Barbados Coast Guard in an all-day, all-hands-on-deck effort covering the entire island.
“Seemingly it’s getting cleaner on the fringes but it’s the illegal dumping on the interior of the island,” Garofano said when the clean-up was nearing midday.
“There are at least three or four places that people have suggested to me since Wednesday and people are using ravines along the East Coast to dump stuff in,” she added.
Last year’s total was 40 tonnes of garbage, fuelled mainly by the hotspotsof Blackmans and Jack-in-the-Box gullies.
But with those areas cleaner than in the past, the only major hot spot this year was a newly discovered illegal dump site at Malvern/Easy Hall in St John.
Some 27 tonnes were removed from the canefields there by a contingent from the BDF, and this will be cleared over the coming week.
The reduced garbage, coupled with the newly discovered dump site, has Garofano, the administrative director of the Future Centre Trust, calling for localised collection points for bulky waste, surveillance of dump sites and greater education.
“We recognise Mangrove Landfill is full; it has been full for years. If these collection points are managed and outsourced in a way that communities know that even if it is once a month, you can go to an open field and there are going to be people there from Sanitation, B’s Recycling and you know you can bring all that stuff, you won’t have to go driving halfway across the countryside ducking around,” she said.
She has further urged Barbadians to reduce, reuse and recycle.
“At least 70 to 80 per cent of the waste we produce can be recycled,” Garofano stressed.
