PEOPLE who continue to litter the nation’s streets or illegally dispose of their garbage could soon find themselves digging deep into their pockets to pay fines of up to $1 million as the National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA) moves to enforce regulations prohibiting littering and defacement of the environment.

According to NSWMA chairman, Alston Stewart, the agency is currently training members of the security forces and environmental wardens, among others, to enforce the regulations.

But before the crackdown, he said the agency would launch a major public education programme designed to increase awareness among members of the public.

“…We feel that need to get the support of the public, and then enforcement will be a last resort,” Stewart said.

This move comes two years after the NSWMA was established by an Act of Parliament and given the power to arrest and prosecute persons who breach public cleanliness regulations.

According to Stewart, the penalties and fines will be substantial enough to serve as a real deterrent. The fines range from a low of $2,000 for basic littering of any public space, to as much as $1 million for disposing of solid waste “in an area; and in a manner not approved by the NSWMA”.

The million-dollar fine applies as well to people operating a solid waste disposal facility without a valid licence and impeding the collection and disposal of solid waste.

Failure to comply with an enforcement notice to discontinue specific offending activities will also attract a fine of a million dollars.

In addition, for removing solid waste from a disposal facility or any location controlled by the authority, the offending person may be fined $500,000 or be imprisoned for six months, or both.

Stewart has broken down the country’s solid waste problem into three main categories: gullies choked with garbage illegally dumped into these waterways; littering of public spaces like town centres and bus terminals; and littering of roadways by commuters.

The authority recently started weekly solid waste pick-ups to clear all beach heads and river mouths.

“We feel that it doesn’t matter where the solid waste is. It is our responsibility to see to its effective disposal,” Stewart said.

The main constraint across all regional agencies of the NSWMA, Stewart disclosed, was that of inadequate resources. However, he said that the authority would shortly take delivery of 20 new garbage compactors from the wharf and the Government was in negotiations with donor agencies to procure 105 new units, including 60 large compactors, 12 small compactors, four transfer stations and an assortment of other vehicles.

But the greatest challenge, said Stewart, was that of influencing a “cultural change” — getting all sectors of the society to practise proper disposal of solid waste. This, he said, was being pursued mainly through public education.

The need for this cultural transformation, he said, was also evident in major tourist destinations in the country. Accordingly, he said the agency was “looking at the routing to those tourist destinations for priority and consistent treatment”.

Among those tourist destinations, Stewart said Montego Bay presented a unique challenge — the failure of commercial entities in particular to properly store their garbage in containers. Alarmed at the deterioration of the situation in the western city, particularly in the downtown area, he explained that the solid waste management agency was working closely with the Montego Bay Chamber of Commerce and the parish council to correct that problem.

Beyond the tourist areas, he’s promising that by yearend solid waste should not be a major problem in any of the country’s major town centres.

While conceding that there was a problem of ambiguity relating to jurisdiction over gullies, Stewart promised that this would soon be settled, with the NSWMA and the National Works Agency collaborating to map the gullies and make a Cabinet submission on how to settle the matter.

Placing the NSWMA in charge of cleaning and maintaining the gullies, however, will have significant budgetary implications. The agency currently spends $1.5 billion (funded in part by property tax receipts and from the Consolidated Fund). To clean 85 per cent of the country, including the gullies, he said, would require a budget of $3.5 billion.

The creation of proper sanitary landfills remains one of the main challenges of the waste agency. “When this programme started we were not operating landfills,” he said, “we were operating dumps. We have moved all the disposal areas that are active into a proper disposal operation. That means that we have regulated access; it means that the waste is disposed of in an organised way and the waste is covered on a regular basis. We have succeeded in doing that in all the landfills we are now operating.”

Stewart was quick to concede, however, that these measures have merely served to create “regular organised dump sites”. The challenge, he said, was to go beyond that to establish international standard sanitary landfills. That process has started at the Riverton landfill, he explained, with substantial improvements to the physical infrastructure.

“We have put lights in to allow for night operation; we’ve put a scale in so we can get empirical data as to what is going in; we have put in a new bridge to allow better access; we are now building an administrative facility,” Stewart explained.

Additionally, he said, the authority was building a waste recovery facility, through which solid waste will be sorted. Tyres are now being sorted, mostly for use on the landfills, but over time Stewart said some of the tyres could be used in river training/gully training etc.

Stewart described the solid waste sector as one that has traditionally been plagued by irregular practices. In that connection he pointed to a group “in and around Riverton that would like to hold us to ransom and extort money from us… wanting money for access to the landfill, wanting to dictate who gets work there, what is paid. But I am not becoming a part of that! We are instituting a very rigid system, an uncompromising programme”, he promised.

Stewart has welcomed the imminent establishment of a paper recycling company, which will be based in the vicinity of the Riverton landfill. Similarly he disclosed that the NSWMA was seeking to assist in the rebirth of Recycle for Life, the private sector-led plastic bottle recycling facility that closed earlier this year, following a Government imposition of a cess on all soft drinks.

“We think it (Recycle for Life) is a very positive initiative that we should not as a society allow to die,” said Stewart. The proposal being looked at, he said, was one in which soft drinks manufacturers would resume funding the programme, possibly with matching funding from government.

Despite the upbeat outlook on his mission at the NSWMA, Stewart has had to focus on the recent emergence of alleged irregularities in the operation of independent garbage contractors hired to service the Metropolitan Parks and Markets zone of St Thomas, Kingston & St Andrew, St Catherine, and Clarendon.

Last month, he suspended the private contractors and called in the police to investigate the alleged irregularities.

The setting of an illegal fire among tyres at the Riverton landfill last Monday has been blamed by the chairman on persons opposed to the suspension of the independent contractors.

Hired in May 2002, the private contractors were used to supplement the agency’s ageing fleet with an established volume of work to be done. Suspicions were aroused, Stewart reported, when, “over time the bill kept escalating when in fact it should remain constant or even be reduced”.

So far, the NSWMA has spent over $90 million on that exercise, with what Stewart described as a “dramatic escalation in cost since February that I’m having difficulty justifying”.

But the authority’s Internal Audit Department has cleared 22 of the 46 trucks, and they are being moved back into the system.

To correct the problem, Stewart revealed that the authority would be moving away from employing trucks and instead place the onus directly onto the contractor to make sure that these units are productive. “And on the basis of their scope of work, which they must complete, payments will be made”, he said.

In the meantime, Stewart is promising to get to the bottom of the alleged irregularities. “My information to date suggests that no one party could have gotten away with it; so it needed either collusion or omission on the part of some members of my staff, and we are looking to tightening up those areas. Let the chips fall where they may! My first priority was to isolate those that documentary evidence showed required further investigation. We’ve completed that exercise and the police and the Financial Investigation Unit are both involved, and whatever reports they provide about the exercise, appropriate action will be taken.”