Member of Parliament (MP) Ardwell Irion has a point (see related story). Banning single-use plastics is a no-brainer and already long overdue, but what about enforcing existing legislation?
The National Alliance (NA) faction member referred to a 26-year-old Waste Ordinance defining how various types of trash are to be disposed of. He indicated that the absence of any awareness effort and lack of knowledge regarding the rules contributes to the problem.
Of course, it helps when there is also an infrastructure to promote best practices. That’s why it was great to see an advertisement by a garbage collection contractor of a certain area they would be getting individual household bins rather than having to take their rubbish to a dumpster.
Such an approach tends to make citizens feel a bit more responsible for their garbage and can stimulate, for example, waste separation with different colour bins and collection schedules as done elsewhere. It doesn’t mean that much if there is no meaningful recycling and most ends up on the landfill anyway, but one needs to start somewhere.
It’s at any rate good that individual garbage contractors take it upon themselves to improve and modernise their collection methods, also in the interest of the environment. The notion that it requires having just one big government-owned company as on several other islands of the former Netherlands Antilles isn’t necessarily correct if proper guidelines are set and their implementation mandated.
Regarding the landfill crisis, in addition to the current underground fire-suppressing activities, a permanent solution to process unrecyclable waste instead of burying it is obviously urgent, and firm policy decisions on incineration, gasification or what have you to produce energy based on objective scientific research and a solid feasibility study are in order, so that not practically every Environment and Infrastructure VROMI minister can come with a different group’s proposal as has been the case up to now.
