Solid waste overwhelms city\\\'s environment

So far as management of solid waste is concerned, the metropolis of Dhaka is not at all different now from what it was before. Many city-points beside busy roads overflow with myriad types of wastes, sludge, with revolting stench filling the air. Similar scenes are found everywhere.
From Azimpur-Nilkhet or Shahbagh to Mohakhali in the city, there are over a dozen large dustbins near traffic-filled roads and bustling footpaths. All of them are filled with garbage beyond capacity and half-buried in knee-deep waste spillovers. There are many roadside dumps with no cover at all; they are fully exposed.
Adding to the city residents' seemingly endless woes, the location of many of these dustbins is at times closer to posh shopping or residential areas. They even make their presence felt to a kindergarten, where cherubic little ones study, or to a private university. Pedestrians walk by them nonchalantly, some covering their noses. They are helpless. They have long been made to pass through this ordeal, literally unbearable though it may appear at times.
Although it has now become a cliché, still it is worth repeating that a large percentage of the capital city's environmental pollution is caused by poor waste disposal.
People residing in Dhaka have become inured to every kind of urban filth. The city corporation (now divided into North and South), or the local government at its head, appears to be totally blasé, as the capital remains adamantly stuck on the list of the most uninhabitable cities in the world.
Throughout the major part of its 400-year-old history, Dhaka could never boast of an efficient management of urban household wastes. Littering and dumping of wastes into a convenient place had hardly been considered a nuisance by its residents. It stopped only in the mid-20th century.
The administrations of the early Nawabs of Dhaka were least bothered about disposal of solid waste. So were the colonial British municipal commissioners. But a section of the ruling bureaucrats did not fail to call Dhaka filthy, full of infectious diseases and a bad climate-afflicted city. Old documents and historical records say so.
The Dhaka Municipality was set up in 1864.  It took many years for the otherwise famed Dhaka to have a systematic way of garbage disposal, and management of it by a designated agency.
In the mid-seventies of the last century, the residents of the capital one day discovered round-shaped corrugated iron-made structures placed on street-sides by the municipality.
It took quite a few days for the Dhaka residents to realise that those were dustbins, meant for dropping household garbage. As the city's population grew, so did the volume of domestic refuse. In a short time, the tin-made dustbins proved too small to contain the fast-rising mass of solid waste coming from nearby localities. Soon they were replaced by four walled, open-air enclosures.
In the early nineties, ostensibly as part of keeping Dhaka clean and free of littering, the city corporation undertook an ambitious plan. It imported jumbo-size covered dustbins, placed them at the city's vital corners, framed specific rules for the citizens on dropping solid waste into the bins. Massive flatbed trucks would take the garbage-filled steel containers away at midnight, replacing them with fresh ones. That was a spectacle, indeed! The grand project continued for some years, before it started faltering due mainly to sharp rise in the volume of the wastes.
These days, few dustbins are seen in the metropolitan Dhaka which are properly used and managed. Spilling of garbage out into the surrounding space, placing the bins at public places, including government designated residential areas and business hubs, are a common scene. The flatbed trucks are no longer in their earlier shape, many have become dysfunctional. Sometimes the garbage-filled containers are seen without covers. As a corporation lorry speeds along the roads, loose trash keeps flying like projectiles.
The shabby waste management by the city corporation makes one wonder whether the authorities have ever thought of waste-recycling in earnest. In modern cities across the world, few refuses are discarded for good. Most of them finally reach the recycling factories. Recycled products are now integral to day-to-day life in the cities elsewhere.
That the dumps of solid waste lying outside the city could turn out to be mines of sorts has kept eluding the authorities concerned. Nothing can be more unfortunate. Given this fact, the question of government patronage for the recycling sector seems absurd, at least for now.
But to speak bluntly, pragmatic solid waste management for Dhaka is imperative if we want to make the city habitable and keep its environment pollution-free. Economic payback also warrants it.
shihabskr@ymail.com