Wanton litter dumping worries traders

A health hazard is looming in Bulawayo as refuse is piling up in both residential and commercial areas as well as marketplaces, due to illegal dumping of waste in open spaces and sanitary lanes.

The odour of uncollected garbage in sanitary lanes in the city and some residential areas has become unbearable as council workers have not been collecting refuse.

In an interview with a council worker who requested anonymity said that failure to collect refuse is a result, of shortage of refuse trucks. “Bulawayo City Council (BCC) currently owns 3 trucks that collect refuse in the CBD and these trucks cannot manage to cover the whole CBD at once,” said the council worker.

“I can safely say refuse is collected once a week in our market,” said MaDube an informal trader who operates at the City Hall Market.

“Residents from areas close to the CBD dump their refuse at our market, they come late at night when we have knocked off and we find heaps of unpleasant refuse in the morning,” lamented MaDube.

Contacted for comment Senior Public Relations Officer Mrs Nesisa Mpofu said “We have had problems with our vehicles, whereby we’ve been having a shortage of vehicles because of breakdowns, but they are progressively repairing them and now the streets are at a manageable size where we are able to balance the CBD and the residential areas.”

“We are also working on improving shifts through increasing them so that we can manage to clear the whole city, we hope that everything will be back to normal soon,” continued Mpofu

“We are also appealing to informal traders to minimise refuse, we have noticed that there is a lot of generation of refuse especially from vegetables, therefore we urge informal traders to avoid ordering produce that is nolonger fresh which will result in disposal,” Mpofu told The Vendors Voice.

Bulawayo Vendors and Traders Association (BVTA) has been offering trainings on value addition on farm produces and green enterprises as an effort to encourage informal traders on diversifying their incomes and to reduce waste produced in market places.

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