ENVIRONMENT-PANAMA: Garbage Disposal a Serious Problem

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Silvio Hernandez

PANAMA CITY, Apr 12 1999 (IPS) - Panama may have a small population – less than three million – by the standards of most other Latin American countries but it’s right up there in the high numbers when it comes to producing unwanted garbage.

In fact disposing of Panama’s trash is becoming a serious environmental and public health problem – particularly in urban areas in the interior where municipalities lack the resources to confront the situation.

Panama City is the only area that has any sort of waste disposal system – a landfill using protective membranes with layers of earth covering the garbage. In the rest of the country, the majority of dumps are found in tropical shrub areas, marshes and along river banks.

But in the capital, the nearby district of San Miguelito and the city of Colon – which contains more than 40 percent of the country’s 2.8 million inhabitants – the problem is a deficient collection system coupled with a low environmental awareness of the majority of the population.

The director of the state Metropolitan Sanitation Authority (DIMA) says that “people keep tossing out their garbage – anywhere and at any time.” He wants the authorities to establish laws that will “punish the residents responsible.”

This attitude of the population undermines the effectiveness of the trash collection agency with great frequency and in all the neighborhoods of the metropolitan area.

DIMA collects about 1,200 tonnes of waste daily in the capital, San Miguelito and Colon.

Makeshift dumps appear daily on the streets and else in metropolitan areas and pose a health hazard to schools, clinics and hospitals, waterways and even the beaches and protected parklands.

In the eastern province of Bocas del Toro, on the Caribbean, a clandestine dump was recently established only two kilometres from the beaches of Bluff and Panch, considered some of the most beautiful on the entire coast, says the mayor of the city of Changuinola, Eduardo Lewis.

Lewis thinks that the solution to the problem could be in privatising trash collection, which would increase the rates paid by residents for the service but which would guarantee that the garbage is deposited in sites assigned by the state.

In the small cities and towns of the interior, the problem stems from the poor resources available to local governments for the collection and disposal of trash through scientific means.

It is estimated that in the rest of the urban centres outside of the metropolitan region, about 1,600 tonnes of waste are generated daily.

The main problem in the small cities and villages of the interior is their low or non-existent capacity to pay the sanitation fees charged by the municipalities, as well as the lack of resources of local governments to acquire garbage trucks and get rid of the garbage in a suitable manner.

Neither is industrialisation a viable alternative, due to the high costs of transporting the waste from the far-flung urban zones of the interior to potential processing plants, the mayor of the city of Parita, Manuel Barrios, told IPS.

In Parita, some 240 kilometres west of the capital of Panama City, the 500 families that reside in the city centre pay the municipal government a total of only 3,500 dollars per year – seven dollars per house – for trash collection services, which “is not enough to pay for gas for the truck,” says Barrios.

In other small cities and towns of the interior where there are collection systems, the sanitation fees vary from between four and six dollars annually.

According to Barrios, the solution is to provide the poorest municipalities with a special budget granted by the central government to confront the problem of suitable waste collection and disposal, “in order to stop polluting the country.”

Small-scale recycling, which could even cover various municipalities in the same region, would be another alternative, underlined Barrios, after indicating that urgent measures are required to prevent poverty from continuing to contribute to the abuse of the country’s natural resources.

Nilson Espino, former director of Dima, feels that if the community is not incorporated and the authorities do not make it clear that this is a national problem, there will be no lasting solution.

Espino recommends that the theme of waste pollution be incorporated into scholastic programs “so that children and teenagers are oriented (to the issue)” and he wants the central government to build landfills which can be used jointly with various small towns in the interior.

“The population of the country is growing; we must be responsible for tackling the garbage problem and the contamination it produces must be confronted to avoid a crisis,” he says