THE National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA) is being urged to push harder, and find more innovative ways to bring the full force of the law down on commercial entities that engage in illegal dumping across the island.

Member of Parliament (MP) for St James Central, Heroy Clarke, believes it is time to stop leaving it up to businesses to disclose to the authority the amount of garbage they generate.

“Who is going to tell you, knowing they will have to pay for it? Its high time that we estimate the situation. Once the person has paid for it in advance, then he will be the enforcer, he will see to it that the garbage is picked up,” Clarke argued on Wednesday at a meeting of the Public Administration and Appropriations Committee (PAAC) with the finance ministry, to discuss allocations in the first supplementary estimates for this fiscal year.

He said when commercial entities leave their waste outside store fronts, for example, the NSWMA is then forced to spend more time organising and collecting, which ultimately impacts the agency’s budget.

Agreeing with the point, St Catherine South MP Fitz Jackson argued further that the pile-up of bulk waste is as a result of the poor collection of domestic garbage particularly in urban centres. “So there is a correlation between those sites and failure in the domestic collection,” he remarked.

Head of the NSWMA Audley Gordon cautioned against excusing poor garbage disposal practices: “There are areas, we will clean them 9 o’clock and one hour after it’s as if it was not cleaned.”

“And there are some that have not been cleaned too,” Jackson commented. He stressed that it is the duty of the NSWMA’s collection supervising teams on the ground to ensure that garbage is collected, “What’s the role of the supervising team on the ground? They’re to keep the place clean, monitor it and intervene when it’s necessary.”

At the same time, PAAC Chairman Mikael Phillips urged the NSWMA to utilise the resources of the national security ministry to nab persons in the act. “We have to find creative ways to try catch some of these persons. In the rural parishes on some of these off roads, these commercial entities dump their garbage at nights, you won’t catch them, you won’t catch them, but within the commercial area, you have cameras, some of the business persons are tied to each other, tying into the police, that we can catch them. We have to find out where it is that they’re dumping garbage,” he suggested.

Gordon again stressed that the NSWMA is being hampered without the critical backing of long-outstanding regulations to govern its operations. “We have a good spread of inspectors across the island, and they’re doing their job [but] there are times when things escape them,” he explained, adding that as a result, support of MPs becomes necessary.

The $561 million allocated to the local government ministry in the supplementary budget is for the NSWMA’s public cleansing activities, $300 million of which is earmarked to clear up arrears to its contractors.

Gordon noted that the arrears had accumulated over a 10-week period, pointing out that the issues affecting the authority at this time is the significant down time among its own fleet, which shifts the burden to contractors. He said, however, that this problem should be significantly resolved with the roll-out of 50 new units, which have now arrived in the island.