Residents and businesses in the catering and recreational sector have been echoing their anger at the Addis Ababa City Administration following unattended garbage piles, which is impacting their work.
According to some residents The Reporter approached around Jemmo area, one of the reasons for the mounting pile of garbage in the backyards of Addis is caused by the closure of the 50-year-old Repi landfill, a.k.a. Koshe, located around Ayer Tena area, On the western outskirts of the capital. The landfill no more serves the purpose.
Others argued that a new landfill, which has recently been built at Sendafa, some 38km north-east of the capital, to serve the capital and some towns, has been blocked following the current protests and clashes in the Oromia Regional State. However, the Addis Ababa Garbage Collection Administration Agency contradicts that.
Dawit Ayele, director general of the agency, told The Reporter that those allegations are unfounded saying that garbage trucks are properly executing their daily duties and are taking the garbages to the new landfill without interruption. However, he admitted that some condominium sites and businesses have faced problems in relation to disputes with companies that are engaged in waste disposal business.
According to Dawit, some private firms engaged in waste disposal activities refused to render services, claiming that the new landfill has become costly and non-profitable because of its distance.
The garbage collection agency disregarded such claims and vowed to take measures against those who have stopped services without formal notice. Dawit said that the actions taken by the private firms have violated agreements they have entered into with restaurants, hotels and the like. Club Juventus, one of the renowned recreational sites frequented by foreigners in the capital, is one of the businesses jumbled by the waste piles. The club has been repeatedly asking the city administration to intervene.
Dawit admitted that in places like Jemmo and Kolfe there have been huge piles not attended to. He argued that it is because of similar resistance from micro-enterprises that are reluctant to remove the garbage.
According to Dawit, the construction of a new state-of-the-art landfill site at the moment has consumed some 700 million birr out of the total one billion and has become operational since January. He added that garbage disposal has become one of the most lucrative businesses which enabled micro enterprises to amass millions in a year. A report publicized by the agency a year ago indicated that some 686,265 cubic meters of garbage helped 568 cooperatives amass 35 million birr. In addition, the report notes that there are 14 private garbage collectors who handled some 150,000 cubic meters in the first six months of 2014.
In a related news, the UK-based Cambridge Industries, a leading waste management firm and producer of green and clean energy from waste, which has been engaged in transforming Repi landfill to a power plant that would generate 50MW of electricity, is to be commissioning its work soon.
It is to be recalled that Samuel Z. Alemayehu, managing director of Cambridge Industries in Ethiopia, a few week ago told The Reporter that the 120 million dollars waste-to-energy project will start operations this year at the latest.
The project is expected to process 1.5 million kilograms of waste daily. In addition to that, the project will convert some 500 million kilograms of waste into ash annually, which in turn will be used to manufacture interlocked bricks.
One kilogram of waste daily piled on the street of the city is estimated to generate 20 percent of the power that can be generated from one litre of diesel oil. The much-awaited project will also be able to collect some 10 million kilograms of scrap metals out of the waste. The plant not only processes waste to generate electricity but also offsets annual emission of 1.5 million tons of carbon from the landfill.
Recent reports, however, indicated that Addis Ababa has been named among one of the top ten dirtiest cities in the world where open defecation, irregular garbage collections, lack of public toilets and poor waste management together with ill-treated construction sites have contributed to the status of the capital.
Negligence and poor waste disposal systems together with lack of edifices with well fostered sanitation and hygiene also contributed to the spread of communicable diseases across Ethiopia.
It is still fresh in the memory of many residents, who were forced to survive diseases such as acute watery diarrhoeal (AWD) that towns like Arba Minch in the Southern Regional State currently are struggling to overcome the outbreak of this disease. No fatalities have been reported so far.
