The Environmental Affairs Department in Malawi has advised Lilongwe City Council not to close the dumping site at Area 38 (Mtaya), saying immediate closure of the site is not a lasting solution to the sanitation challenges residents are facing.
Speaking in an interview, Deputy Director for Environmental Affairs Department, Benon Yassin, said the council first need to establish an engineered landfill site where the waste can be recycled and used to produce products such as fertilizer, plastic pumps and chairs.
This comes as in January this year, parliamentary committee on Natural Resources and Climate Change recommended immediate closure of Six miles (Mtaya) dumping site arguing it is very close to the city.
The committee gave the city council 14 days to identify another site away from the city that will be used as a new dumping site.
But through an interview, Yassin said that the department advised the city council to implement lasting solutions to the problem.
Yassin argued that the council should consider a sanitary or engineered landfill dumping site by introducing facilities to compact and recycle the waste so that the waste can be turned into products such as fertilizers and other products.
“If we just say close the site and move it to another, we are transferring the problem to the new site. But we should find lasting solutions that would make the new site have facilities to recycle waste from the old site so that the new site does not get full,” said Yassin.
He added that the Ministry of Natural Resources and Climate Change is engaging partners to identify funds that could be used for recycling waste into various products.
In his response to the issue, Mayor for Lilongwe City Council, Richard Banda, said the city council also submitted planned proposals to private partners partnership for recycling projects.
“As Lilongwe City Council we have already submitted our planned proposal to Private Partners Partnership (PP) to work on that. Investors are already on the ground so that they can start recycling those waste but the challenge is PPP, they are delaying us too much and people are regarding us as failures,” said Banda.
Early this year, parliamentary committee on Natural Resources and Climate Change, Environmental Affairs Department, Malawi Environmental Protection Authority, Lilongwe City Council and others visited Six miles (Mtaya) dumping site to witness the situation at the site.
The visit came after Lilongwe residents especially those from Area 38 claimed that the dumping site is a threat to their lives and that the waste blocks the road making it impassable.
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