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Sifelani Tsiko Agric & Environment Editor
Zimbabwe capital, Harare is once again staring down a waste management crisis following the raging fires that engulfed the infamous Pomona dumpsite, sparking outrage among residents in northern and western suburbs in the city.
The open burning of mountains of garbage has irked residents who complain bitterly about this perennial crisis, which has affected them for years without a solution in sight.
“We can’t open windows here in Vainona. We are coughing all the time, unable to breathe, sometimes we wake up and see ash on our windows and everywhere in our yards,” says Mitchel Gombera, of Vainona, an affluent suburb north of Harare.
“The intensity of the smell from the Pomona dumpsite makes us dizzy. When there is open burning at the dumpsite we can’t breathe. We have had to seek medication for various respiratory ailments.”
The open burning of waste at the dumpsites has elicited heavy criticism of the Harare City Council as this is dangerous and causes a range of short- and long-term health problems for the residents within the affected parts.
In October 2013, the Pomona dumpsite went burning for more than two weeks, something which has become an annual occurrence since then.
A satellite image taken on October 20 in 2013 by the Geo-Information and Remote Sensing Institute (GRSI) at the Scientific and Industrial Research and Development Centre showed plumes of smoke billowing into the sky moving all the way past the city centre, over high density residential areas that included Mbare and Glen View, all the way up to Beatrice.
Researchers say airborne pollutants affect health in varying degrees of severity, ranging from serious illness to premature death in extreme cases.
They say such pollutants may produce immediate (acute), as well as long term (chronic), symptoms which can aggravate chronic respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, alter host defences, damage lung tissue, lead to premature death, and possibly contribute to cancer.
The open burning of waste at Pomona dumpsite has serious consequences for the health of people living nearby and many far afield.
Dangers include exposure to fine particles, dioxins, volatile organic compounds, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon, and polychlorinated biphenyls, which have been linked to heart disease, cancer, skin diseases, asthma, and respiratory illnesses.
The dangers of open burning of waste are compounded by the fact that Harare does not properly dispose of its domestic and industrial waste.
“The City of Harare was given up to 2012 to redesign the Pomona dump to manage waste in a proper and sustainable way. With adequate prioritisation and investment, a modern waste management development plan should have been in place by now,” says Professor Sara Feresu, director of the Institute of Environmental Studies (IES) at the University of Zimbabwe.
“We need a lasting solution to Pomona dumpsite crisis. It could include developing mechanisms to tap methane gas — a major driver of the fires — at this site produced by micro-organism, promoting safer and practical strategies for waste recoverers to work in to separate and recycle waste and even going further to developing a solid waste recycling plant at this site.”
She believes strongly that Harare can develop a solid industry for waste management at the site to help reduce the open burning of solid waste.
“Harare should follow the plans which were developed to manage waste sustainably. We can build a huge industry out of this waste, creating jobs and generating income for many. We have to take urgent measures to stop open burning of waste at this site which poses serious public health risks to people,” Prof Feresu says.
“Harare has to redesign the dumpsite following clearly laid out waste management plans to stop air and underground water pollution, to reduce methane gas burning — another greenhouse gas. The major problem is lack of resources and as a city we need to set our priorities right.”
The year in, year out open burning of the Pomona dumpsite implicates the City of Harare’s legal obligations to protect the health of its citizens.
Open burning is a consequence of the city’s failure to manage solid waste in a way that respects environmental and health laws designed to protect people. Children and older persons are at particular risk.
The city council is grappling to survive financially and Pomona dumpsite open fires take a back seat on its priorities.
Without adequate financial support, technical expertise and oversight to take practical steps to develop a proper waste management system at this site, the open burning of waste will continue unabated posing serious consequences for the health of people living nearby.
A range of scientific studies by SIRDIC, UZ and other universities have documented the dangers that emissions from the open burning of waste pose to human health.
Harare City Council has never solved the waste management problem at the Pomona dumpsite by doing landfills to douse the fires.
Every year, it just pushed the open burning of the garbage out of sight without any clearly laid out short-term emergency measures.
Current measures to stop the raging fires are costly, they require fuel for bulldozers, a large of army of volunteers and even enlisting the services of the Air Force of Zimbabwe to put out the fires.
There are no emergency plans at all. The situation just gets attention when there is open burning and when the fires stop, the whole Pomona dumpsite crisis gets far less attention.
People living nearby now live in constant fear of the long-term health impact on them and their children.
The garbage crisis and burning of waste are symptoms of the larger problem in Harare — a failure for decades to develop and carry out a long term city waste management plan that is based on public health principles that are environmentally sound.
Apart from the council, the garbage crisis is also a collective responsibility for all the city residents. There are clear solutions to waste management. Researchers say about 90 percent Harare’s solid waste is made up of materials that could be composted or recycled.
But only a negligible amount is being recycled and composted. The rest is being landfilled, dumped, or burned. The council has not even taken the basic step of providing a convenient recycling option for the city residents.
Researchers, the Environmental Management Agency and other environmentalists developed a sustainable solid waste management plan which was required to be adopted by all urban councils by 2012.
Harare has not adopted it. Environmentalists and volunteers have shown that it is possible to apply sustainable waste management practices in Harare at low cost.
But the council has so far seemed incapable of adopting and carrying out a cohesive solution to this.
Researchers at Scientific and Industrial Research and Development Centre (SIRDIC) say they are broadly two classes of presumptive remedies that exist to deal with abandoned and uncontrolled waste sites — containment and treatment.
Containment, they say, simply prevents the spread of contaminants to the soil, air, and water, whereas treatment employs technologies to rid the area of contaminants.
“Containment is enforced by the Environmental Management Agency through the requirement of lining waste dumps. This involves the construction of an impermeable containment layer at the bottom of the dumpsite and therefore gets implemented on new sites, before the dumping starts, after which the waste also has to be covered regularly,” read part of SIRDIC report on Pomona dumpsite.
“As opposed to containment, the treatment regimens for solid wastes most often employed are some form of combustion or thermal treatment, including a) incineration, which uses high temperatures to degrade contaminants, on-site thermal destruction, which is, in effect, a low-grade incineration process; and c) thermal desorption, in which toxic chemicals are first desorbed from the medium, collected, transported off-site, and then usually incinerated.”
“Furthermore, recommend alternative methods of waste-management are known, and, local municipalities should properly dispose of poisonous waste, which includes plastics and e-waste by first of all separating it from ordinary trash.
The researchers further say that companies that have solid waste from their products should be held accountable or responsible for recovering and recycling their product after it is used.
Many studies reported possible solutions for improving the solid waste management such as organic waste buyback programmes, with compost or biogas production, implementation of waste-to-energy plans and technologies, waste-to-energy in parallel with recycling of glass, metals and other solid waste items.
Production of energy from biomass waste by making briquettes, involvement of the integration of waste pickers with legal incentives, among others.
However, many barriers still remain for improving formal collection, treatment and final disposal. And it seems, the Pomona dumpsite open burning crisis will remain a big issue for years to come until common solutions are identified and implemented.
Online Reporter