Garbage disposal issues

For sure, daily, we are bound to take out of our comfort homes some kind of trash, be it organic, recyclable or simply the throwaway kind. Some time or later you are surely bound to encounter inconveniences when working your way on pavements around heaps of rotting, stinking and overflowing garbage. This is certainly not a case of one man’s trash being another man’s treasure.

Projections indicate that our national rate of trash production is bound to keep rising. This should be a huge concern as waste, of whatever type, can be a proxy for environmental stress. There is one thing that fades out of the news cycle: the piles of garbage that are growing around the country.

Much of our waste is not handled properly. Millions of plastic fragments flood our seas and disrupt marine ecosystems and plenty of trash dumped haphazardly around the country is either burned in incinerators that generate air pollution or dumped recklessly in our urban and suburban environments. Even if we sealed all our waste in sanitary landfills there would still be a much bigger problem with our growing piles of garbage.

Roadside trash is becoming a big problem and we only have ourselves to blame. Photo: Chris Sant Fournier

Even though I do not see waste disposal as a huge environmental problem in itself, it is the easiest way to see how the environment is being affected by our lifestyles overall.

Roadside trash, too, is becoming a big problem and we only have ourselves to blame. Have you taken any road trips recently? If so, you may have seen trash alongside the road, from food to tobacco products to the ever-present plastic.

Let’s face it. The Cleansing and Maintenance Division and Wasteserv have the mammoth task of promoting an environment free from refuse, rubbish, debris, litter, dirt or any other form of abandoned waste and they are doing a splendid job of it. But we cannot expect them to do the impossible. Each one of us has to do his or her part, too. We need to revisit our cultural and policy dimensions of waste production. One of the surest signs that Malta is an affluent society is the trash beneath your feet. Public cleanliness, though, risks becoming a rare commodity.

Mark Said – Msida

Low governance acumen

Roberto Pestano is right in that e-scooters can be part of the solution to excessive cars on the road, especially in Malta where distances travelled are relatively short.

Electric bikes would also help because they are easier to park than cars and can save the hassle of being stuck in traffic jams. I’ve noticed in the UK that, apart from town centres and other prominent places, most universities now have banks of electric bikes for students to hire, to get them to, from and around town or even on the campus itself.

I appreciate that these are simple and obvious partial solutions to the problem on the island but, sadly, there is more to gain for the authorities in fining users than creating easy solutions.

I’ve just been reading about a very intricate and elaborate fraud involving a benefit racket, running unnoticed over many years and allegedly involving Labour MPs and other government circles, reaching as far up as the office of the prime minister. You see, governance acumen among those in authority is very low.

Therefore, Pestano must not give up and should perhaps try the only fail-safe way of obtaining anything on the island – the backhander.

Paul Brincau – Uxbridge, UK