THE National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA) embarked on what appeared to be an uphill battle on Wednesday afternoon, to appeal to the good senses of residents of Cassava Piece in St Andrew, imploring them not to dump garbage in a gully that runs through the community.

The NSWMA, during a walk through the community Wednesday, said it has launched a pilot project in Cassava Piece that is geared towards a better system of garbage disposal. If the programme is successful it is expected that the NSWMA and its partners will spread it to other communities that have a similar problem.

However, the success of the plan for better garbage disposal and collection in the area will depend on moral suasion as a previous attempt failed because some residents continued to dump garbage in the gully .

Aretha McFarlane, director of operations at the NSWMA, explained, “This walk-through is mainly to educate the residents about proper waste management practices and the risk of disposing improperly, especially in the waterways.

“This approach today is a joint one. If we have our residents getting sick, the Ministry of Health would be impacted, the environment would be damaged and we wouldn’t have a sustainable future for the younger generations coming up. We want to keep the environment clean. If you look in the gully you will see garbage and bulky waste. We have implemented an initiative to keep garbage from going into the gully but we still have the illegal dumping,” she said.

“We can’t continue to have this. We have to take care of the health of our people and our people must take care of their health as well. That is why today the NSWMA saw it fit to bring in the Ministry of Health and the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) to talk with the residents and tell them that this is not good for them. This is what causes flooding. When the garbage washes down and especially when it reaches a bottleneck and can’t flush through, the water is going to rise and then you are going to have lives being lost and property affected by this. We need to get back to a place of civic pride,” McFarlane said.

Rachael Reid, customer relations officer of the NSWMA, said that the decision to have the walk-through on Wednesday came after a meeting which was held last week.

“Following the stakeholders’ meeting last week Wednesday we identified some things that we are going to do immediately, which is to place drums in the community, put up ‘no dumping’ signs, as well as put up some signage to try and warn people about dumping in the gully. We are going to do a bulky waste clean-up on Saturday and Sunday coming,” Reid said.

Part of the plans, as well, is to serve 14-day notices on owners of derelict vehicles which prevent the free movement of garbage trucks throughout the community. If there is no response after 14 days, the NSWMA plans to have the vehicles removed and dumped at designated dump sites.

Janice Hinds Lake Fray and Julie Edwards, who are environmental wardens employed by the NSWMA, said that constant sensitisation of residents is key because many of them are “stubborn and stuck in their ways”.

Lake Fray said: “When I come and catch them dumping I will talk but they don’t care.” She said that last week during a community meeting a woman brought rubbish from her house and dumped in it the gully while the attendees of the meeting watched in awe.

According to Edwards, while some of the people will cooperate with the no-dumping request, others are outright stubborn and barefaced.

“You have people in here who don’t throw rubbish in the gully at all. When I say none at all, not even a paper they throw in the gully. I have to clean up a particular spot in the evening. I see a man throwing garbage in the gully the other day and I asked him if he knew I could charge him. He was barefaced and said I should charge him.”

One female resident told the Jamaica Observer that many people resort to dumping rubbish in the gully because of the system of garbage collection is not what it ought to be.

“When the rubbish truck come it’s just a little truck and by the time it reach [part way] it is full. By the time the people who live in the lane bring down their rubbish, the truck gone already. They need a better system. I sat there last week and not even blow I hear the truck horn blow. When it reach right here they said the truck was full,” she said.