HEAD of the National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA) Colonel Daniel Pryce says garbage collection should improve in another six to eight months with the arrival of 17 new Renault compactors.

Cabinet approved the ¤$1.9 million contract this week.

Explaining the turnout of less than half of the agency’s supplementary collection fleet, which has caused severe backlog in the collection of garbage in some areas, Pryce said there are more trucks than are needed in the supplementary fleet to enable some level of flexibility, but despite this, there are still challenges.

“There is a framework agreement with private contractors — it’s a non-binding agreement that they will assist when necessary when we have a reduction in our own fleet and we agree on a set rate per trip, (but) there are times when due to a myriad of factors, they don’t turn up — a lot of them are second-hand compactors, they are very old, and so mechanically sometimes they go down (or) they might have had another entity to assist, and so they don’t turn up,” he outlined.

The executive director said the agency needs at least another 90 compactors for smooth collection, but that the expected 17 would enhance the current fleet of 107 compactors, which are not all serviceable.

“The fleet is of different ages and they sometimes go down, and if it goes down for anything over 48 hours, it will cause some amount of backlog. But we sometimes use other types of vehicles such as a dump truck to help with removal of the waste from time to time, or we call on the supplementary fleet,” he explained.

— Alphea Saunders