Tag: waste

>Friday – Kissy Dumpsite #sierraleone

July 29, 2010 / Benjamin Welby / 0 Comments

>Having visited the works yards we went to the second of Freetown’s dumpsites.

Kissy is in the east of the city and is along the main route out of Freetown. It’s not far from the works yards which are also located in this part of the city.

It’s similar to Kingtom but probably worse. Kingtom has been created on an area of flat land through the middle of which a road runs. In the wet season half of the site is given over to farming because the land is not stable enough to cope with vehicles. Despite the lack of any earth moving equipment to keep the piles under control or the absence of any sorting it works, after a fashion.

At Kissy there was more evidence of people scavenging from the sites and people living along the border of the site. There were the remains of a broken Caterpillar slowly getting covered in waste. There was no sign of the road that had been built two years ago. This was a site built on a hill so when they’d built the road they had built it at a gradient. As the waste accumulated it became harder and harder to pass, harder and harder for vehicles to get back from the bottom and so the waste was dumped closer and closer to the road.

Now the situation is that they can’t drive onto the dump. So it’s entirely blocked from any new waste being dumped there. The result is they’ve started a third dump somewhere else where there was a whole.

During this visit we heard that a perfect location has been identified by the World Bank, somewhere that the waste could be properly managed and the landfill engineered well away from the residential areas it currently juts up against. Of course there’s nothing to guarantee that people won’t encroach upon that piece of land, or scavenge for whatever they can lay their hands on. But even before that becomes an issue there are a number of hurdles to overcome. One of the key obstacles is the logistics of the thing.

And that comes back to Freetown’s roads.

This third site is down the road between Hastings and Waterloo. So it fits the bill for being out of town. It isn’t near a water course and it could be engineered from scratch. However, it’s hard enough for the 7 working vehicles to service the 45 transit sites and include regular trips to Kissy or Kingtom. For them to have to add an out of town excursion to that means more time sat in traffic, more strain on the vehicles, less time actually collecting the rubbish.

And then there’s the economic ecosystem that lives off the existing sites. In the vacuum that had been left by waste no longer being filled at the farthest limits of the site there had been a lot of encroachment (this is the point being made at the beginning of the video). This is one of the hardest things to fathom about our time in Freetown – it’s not just a dump, it’s a home, a source of income, a source of food and a social space. The images of kids playing with kites, of parents carrying babies around, of whole lives found living on the edges is harrowing and difficult. We don’t want people to be living on a landfill site but the reality is that this is a crucial slice of the economy in a city where there aren’t exactly an abundance of different ways to make money. Perhaps a properly engineered landfill could see waste being sorted and might enable stuff to be retrieved without having to pick through the detritus of the city but it’s likely that won’t cushion the fall out and the repercussions on those lives we catch sight of in this video.

>Friday – Freetown City Council works yard #sierraleone

July 28, 2010 / Benjamin Welby / 0 Comments

>After our tour round the Freetown Waste Management Company’s (FWMC) depot we moved next door to take a look at the council’s yard. Until recently the two sites operated independently with FWMC acting as a stand alone private business commissioned by FCC to deliver waste collection for Freetown. A degree of separation remains but the two entities are more closely entwined, at least for now (the council seem desperate to outsource it as quickly as possible).

It transpires that FWMC have not been handling all waste collection. Do you remember the night gabbage collection at the market with the two lads perched precariously at the back of a lorry? The central market areas were the responsibility of the council to look after and to help them in doing that Hull City Council had sent three Vultures about six years ago. At the yard we saw evidence of all three but only one of them was in working order. The others had been cannibalised for parts to keep the others going. Now the final vehicle was struggling to keep going and FWMC had been press ganged into making sure the market didn’t drown under rubbish.

However, the highlight of this trip was undoubtedly the sweeper. Earlier in the day when Doug Sharp and Bowenson Phillips had been on Lunchtime Break a viewer had texted a question to ask what had become of Freetown’s infamous road sweeper. And we were privileged enough to get a photo taken alongside the folly of a former mayor.

Apparently, the story goes, the mayor acquired the sweeper for 500,000,000 Sierra Leone Leones (that’s something like £80,000), a massive outlay for the city. It arrived with much fanfare about six years ago but worked for about half a day. The reason for it sitting dormant in the yard is unclear – someone suggested there was a skills gap in using it that meant the brushes could not be raised and as a result this damaged it, someone else said it was a question of parts but the overwhelming consensus was that the mayor had made completely the wrong decision in getting hold of a vehicle designed for evenly paved, properly made roads in a city where surfaces like that are not exactly common. Questions were raised over the cost of the vehicle and whether there had been a discount on it, or whether it had been given for free but nevertheless, as word of this waste of FCC funds got out the mayor was hounded out of the city in shame. Emerson, one of Sierra Leone’s leading musical artists and well known for the political sparring of his lyrics even penned a song about the debacle.

At least we might be able to put to bed the rumour that the vehicle has been heavily cannibalised. But to the naked eye most of it looked to be in pristine condition. The problem is that the vehicle is completely inappropriate for Freetown’s needs.

>Friday – Freetown Waste Management Company works yard #sierraleone

July 26, 2010 / Benjamin Welby / 0 Comments

>Friday began with rain, and lots of it, but by the time we arrived at the Freetown Waste Management Company’s (FWMC) depot the sun was shining and the ground was dry.

The tour of the works yard was fascinating. Led from one constraint to another by the clearly very capable Foday Fornah we saw the Freetown equivalent to Hull’s Dalton Street depot. It would be more appropriate to think of it in terms of a graveyard holding the remains of both vehicles and strategic ideas.

I mentioned in a previous post that Hull has something like 60 vehicles for 117,000 households. These five vehicles account for about 40% of FWMC’s total vehicular strength. That’s to service the waste requirements of 2.5m people. And each of the ones in that picture, as well as another one elsewhere in the depot are in need of repairs placing an ever increasing burden on the vehicles that are working (well, they are for now).

We also saw the carcasses of the two earth moving vehicles that had, once upon a time, kept Kingtom and Kissy under control. Broken down, cannibalised for parts and now just left to rot.

In one corner were the yellow handcarts that had once been used by Klin Salone and other social enterprises to devolve the responsibility of collecting the waste still further. To enthusiastic youths who could collect the garbage and earn money from householders whilst FWMC gave them the tools and disposed of the waste. Because there were reports that some of them were taking money from householders and then dumping the waste round the corner rather than at the agreed sites meant this idea was knocked on the head. And so they sit in the corner of the works yard.

Elsewhere are the remains of these bins. The idea was simple – get some bins, go to retail businesses and charge them a monthly fee for locating the bins on their premises and FWMC will clear the garbage on a regular basis. Not only a way of generating some revenue but a further way of sensitising the Freetown population to use bins where they’re provided.

Unfortunately, as you can see, they’re completely unsuitable – made from a material that has rusted, without lids and not strong enough to stand the pressures they might have been subjected to. Nobody would pay to have bins like this on their premises. Chalk this one up to the ‘former management’.

Given the road network of Freetown and the fact that it’s not just streets of houses the solution isn’t as simple as providing a fleet of waste compacting vehicles like we would have here. In fact, the way in which waste is being moved from house, to central point, to dump, is an effective principal. So it was a good idea to look at the hand carts and think that a similar role could be met by providing motorised tricycles that could take waste from one site to another. On the Thursday evening we’d seen them in action in the city centre but, once again, the utility of these approaches is let down by the fact there’s more to go wrong. Of something like 20 vehicles, only 8 are in service.

We also had a look inside the stores – we saw some spare parts for the vehicles, and a few tyres and a collection of different bins including the familiar wheelie bins (without the wheels). Apparently they’re keen to experiment with these bins but the unit cost of approximately $150 was a barrier. This is in contrast to the £30 cost of a bin to us in Hull. As part of our new waste strategy we recently replaced 140 litre blue bins with larger capacity 240 litre ones. They’ve all been recycled now but could we have usefully sent them here instead? Obviously there’s a total cost to be worked out for shipping from here to there and it raises the contentious issue of #SWEDOW (‘Stuff We Don’t Want’) but that’s a debate for a blog of its own.

That’s an attempt to distil the more important issues identified on our visit to the works yard but you’d really miss out if you didn’t get it from Foday Fornah himself. There’s a lot of info in these four videos and apologies that neither sound or camerawork is necessarily perfect but it beat taking notes!

Thursday – Night Gabbage #sierraleone

July 24, 2010 / Benjamin Welby / 0 Comments

As I mentioned in today’s first post, Freetown is a city that never sleeps when it comes to waste management.

Throughout the day the city centre is both a hive of activity (this short video captures some of it) and a congested mass of vehicles. Either way it makes waste collection difficult during the day. The solution is to work through the night to get on top of the waste situation ahead of the following day.

To do this Freetown Waste Management Company (FWMC) and Freetown City Council (FCC) deploy a number of techniques.

First of all are the sweepers. They’re generally women and their task is to sweep the streets and pile up the rubbish.

Then there are those who collect that rubbish and bring it to agreed transit points, generally using one of the 7 or 8 motorised tricycles that FWMC have in operation.

One of the waste vehicles will have been parked at an agreed location and then begins the process of taking the waste off the back of a tricycle, dumping it on the ground behind the vehicle and then transferring it into the lorry. The compactor will then run in the period between tricycles. When it’s full it will go to Kingtom or Kissy and the whole thing will start again.

It is no surprise that the most common faults with the vehicles relate to clutch and starter motor. The vehicles are Mercedes, the nearest stockist is in Guinea and there is no way of getting non-branded equivalent parts meaning that the upkeep and maintenance of the vehicles is almost impossible for the FWMC works team (but more of that later).

The markets are dealt with slightly differently. Six years ago Hull City Council sent 3 ‘vultures’ that were coming out of service to Sierra Leone (there’s a ‘Stuff We Don’t Want’ debate to be visited with regards everything we saw over the last week). FCC controlled these throughout the period of time that the FWMC was in charge of waste. These vehicles were used by the council to keep the market areas tidy. Only one of them is still in service and that had broken down.

So, when we went out on the night collection we saw some pretty precarious activity in the market where waste had begun to pile up in amongst the various food and non-food stalls. You can see from the pictures what the solution was: a big lorry and a two wheeled cart to stand on…

>Thursday – Kingtom #sierraleone

July 24, 2010 / Benjamin Welby / 0 Comments

>Kingtom was known to me from my previous visit to Sierra Leone. It was where I’d spent my first nights in country. But I didn’t venture near the dump.

Freetown has two. There’s one at Kissy and there’s this one at Kingtom. It’s in the heart of the city and borders a water course. It’s far removed from how we manage landfill here.

For starters people can roam freely. Whilst they’re not supposed to, it hasn’t stopped people building homes, scavenging for reusable materials or even indulging in a little bit of agriculture. In fact, when it comes to using the landfill as temporary farmland that’s a source of revenue for the Freetown Waste Management Company/Freetown City Council.

Add to that the absence of measuring the waste that comes in. There’s no earth moving equipment to keep on top of the garbage. This means that during the rainy season only half the site is safe to use (hence providing the opportunity for agriculture). Lorries come right into the dump, drive onto the rubbish and choose somewhere to dump it without any sorting.

We weren’t sure who was staff but we came to the conclusion that if they had wellies then that probably meant they were legitimate. However, that was the extent of protective equipment. As medical waste is treated in the same way as everything else that places these men, women and children at huge risk of needle stick injuries.

On the up side the road that ran through it was amongst the best in Freetown…

>Thursday – Transit Sites #sierraleone

July 24, 2010 / Benjamin Welby / 1 Comment

>Here’s a retrospective look at the week we spent in Sierra Leone. A blow by blow account of each day. As you might expect, that’s going to involve a lot of looking at rubbish!

Day one, Thursday saw us meeting with the Chief Administrator of Freetown City Council (FCC), Bowenson Philips and put together an idea of what we would look at for the rest of the week. We spent some time with Freetown’s elected members and then we headed off to learn about how a city of 2.5m deals with the rubbish it produces.

Waste is once again the responsibility of FCC. For the last few years the issue of waste was handled by an independent, arms length company created by the World Bank called Freetown Waste Management Company (FWMC). Now that the direct involvement of the World Bank has come to an end without FWMC being in a position to operate independently it has been brought back ‘in-house’ (although the noises from FCC suggested they were in favour of returning to a commissioned service as soon as possible). Donald Tweed, the head of FWMC, took us to see how things worked. The first things we saw were two ‘transit sites’.

These are places in the city which are agreed points for dumping garbage. The council’s ‘fleet’ of waste compactor lorries then roams the streets of the city (almost continuously) going from transit site to transit site where it is then transferred from its holding bays into the back of the lorries. When they’re full they go to one of two dumps to be emptied.

Essentially this means that all waste is handled three times. You have those who are collecting waste from households, or businesses, or stall holders. Some of those are employees of FWMC, some are social entrepreneurs whose payment comes from those whose waste they collect. Either way their rubbish is dumped at these 40 odd transit sites. Freetown Waste Management Company then come along, empty the transit sites onto the ground, and shift it all into the back of the waste compacting vehicles.

FWMC had enjoyed working with the youth enterprises that were collecting waste and had provided them with the yellow carts you can see in the videos and the pictures. However, some of them had begun taking payment from householders to collect waste but were then choosing to dump it wherever they liked rather than at the transit sites. As a result FWMC were collecting the carts back in (and you can see evidence of this at the works yard).

Immediately we came up against the difficulties Freetown faces in getting waste off the streets. Although there was some evidence of sorting pretty much all the waste is lumped together. This includes medical waste as well as the high proportion of organic material sent to landfill. The strain this places on the city is compounded by a lack of vehicles to service a city of this size. In Hull, we have about 60 of these vehicles for 117,000 households all of whom receive a doorstep collection. Freetown has 10, not all of which work. Moreover, they’re lorries designed for door to door collection and that’s not really what Freetown needs.

Ideas were already forming about how processes might be improved. One of the suggestions was that it would be possible to increase the speed with which waste was collected by using front loading vehicles like the one picture above. However, it may well speed up the collection of waste and reduce the number of staff required but vehicles like that cost in excess of £100,000.