A year after a heavily funded municipal waste management project kicked in, piles of rubbish mount in residential areas across Grahamstown.
A year after a heavily funded municipal waste management project kicked in, piles of rubbish mount in residential areas across Grahamstown.
Last year the Department of Environmental Affairs set aside a total of R20 million to tackle waste management head-on in 11 Eastern Cape municipalities. One of them was Makana.
A report on the 'EC – Youth Jobs in Waste' report was tabled at a meeting of Makana's Public Safety and Community Services Portfolio Committee earlier this month. According to the project description, around 243 young people were to be employed for one year to assist municipalities in conducting environmental education and awareness campaigns, and managing landfill site operations and waste collection.
The report states that at the beginning of September 2013, Makana and 10 other municipalities appointed the project workers, who began on 1 October.
Their brief included environmental education and awareness campaigns, along with marketing material; a two-bin waste collection system and weigh pads at landfill sites along with offices. Project supervisor in Makana, Xolani Kiti, said in Makana, 25 young people were appointed. Fifteen of these were environmental educators and 10 general workers.
While the project had started off well, it was not doing very well at the moment, Kiti said. He confirmed that the project ends on 31 August. Kiti said the project's main focus was illegal dumping in the township.
He cited the withdrawal of part of the project's management as the reason for the project's slowing down in the past month. The report came weeks after a visit to the Grahamstown dump by the Green Scorpions, alerted after continuous burning there had covered the city in a pall of smoke.
According to the municipality, the specialised unit that investigates environmental offences had found nothing amiss with the way the facility was being managed. The report also comes just over a month after a municipal workers' strike during the National Arts Festival left rubbish scattered on streets throughout the city.
Residents continue to complain about rubbish subsequently dumped near their homes. On 8 August Grocott's Mail reported on the plight of a family of four whose Bowker Street home had become an illegal dumping spot. Sophia Goliath, a foster-care mother to three-year-old twins, told reporters she had been complaining to the municipality for months with no response.
"I have reported it to everyone, the environmental officer and to the councillor and nobody did anything about it," Goliath said. When reporters visited her home, smoke was issuing from the burning pile.
Goliath said officials had started the fire, then threw soil over it to stop it.
