Women from the community of Balgüe working with waste materials donated to the Association of Women Recyclers of Altagracia on the island of Ometepe in Nicaragua. Credit: Karin Paladino/IPS

By José Adán Silva
ALTAGRACIA, Nicaragua, Sep 7 2015 (IPS)

A group of poor women from Ometepe, a beautiful tropical island in the centre of Lake Nicaragua, decided to dedicate themselves to recycling garbage as part of an initiative that did not bring the hoped-for economic results but inspired the entire community to keep this biosphere reserve clean.

It all began in 2007. María del Rosario Gutiérrez remembers her initial interest was piqued when she saw people who scavenged for waste in Managua’s garbage dumps fighting over the contents of bags full of plastic bottles, glass and metal.

How much could garbage be worth for people to actually hurt each other over it? she wondered. She was living in extreme poverty, raising her two children on her own with what she grew on a small piece of communal land in the municipality of Altagracia, and the little she earned doing casual work.

Gutiérrez talked to a neighbour, who told her that in Moyogalpa, the other town on the island, there was an office that bought scrap metal, glass and plastic bottles.

The two women checked around and found in their community a person who bought waste material from local hotels, washed it and sold it to Managua for recycling.

So Gutiérrez, who is now 30 years old, got involved in her new activity: every day she walked long distances with a bag over her shoulder, picking up recyclable waste around the island.

Her neighbour and other poor, unemployed women started to go with her. Then they began to go out on bicycles to pick up garbage along the roads tossed out by tourists, selling the materials to a middleman.

“It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was enough to put food on our tables. And since we didn’t have jobs, it didn’t matter to us how much time it took, although the work was really exhausting at first,” Gutiérrez told IPS.

María del Rosario Gutiérrez (centre), with her daughter María and another member of the Association of Women Recyclers of Altagracia, Francis Socorro Hernández, rest after a day collecting and processing garbage on the island of Ometepe, in Nicaragua. Credit: José Adán Silva/IPS

Women filling enormous bags with scraps of trash have now become a common sight along the streets on the island.

Seeds of change

Miriam Potoy, with the Fundación entre Volcanes, said her non-governmental organisation decided to support women who were scavenging for a living, starting with a group in Moyogalpa.

“We initially helped them with safety and hygiene equipment, then with training on waste handling and treatment and the diversified use of garbage, so they could sell it as well as learn how to make crafts using the materials collected, to sell them to tourists and earn an extra income,” she told IPS.

Impressed by the women’s efforts, other institutions decided to support them as well.

The Altagracia city government gave them a place to collect, classify and sort the waste, tourism businesses that previously separated their garbage to sell recyclable materials decided to donate them to the women, and food and services companies provided equipment and assistance.

Solidarity and cooperation with the group grew to the point that the city government obtained funds to pay the women nearly two dollars a day for a time, and provide them with free transportation to take their materials to the wharf, where they were shipped to the city of Rivas. From there, the shipments go by road to Managua, 120 km away.

“The community appreciates the women’s work not only because they help keep the island clean, which has clearly improved its image for tourists, but also because they have showed a strong desire to improve their own lives and their families’ incomes,” said Potoy.

And they have done this “by means of a non-traditional activity, which broke down the stereotype of the role women have traditionally played in these remote rural communities,” she said.

Francis Socorro Hernández, another woman from the first batch of recyclers, told IPS that at the start “it was embarrassing for people to see us picking up garbage.”

But she said that after taking workshops on gender issues, administration of micro-businesses, and the environment, “I realised I was doing something important, and that it was worse to live in a polluted environment, resigned to my poverty – and I stopped feeling ashamed.”

The Concepción volcano, one of the two that are found on the island of Ometepe in the middle of Lake Nicaragua, seen from the port of San Jorge in the western department or province of Rivas. Credit: Karin Paladino/IPS

Their work also inspired other initiatives. For example, Karen Paladino, originally from Germany but now a Nicaraguan national, is the director of the community organisation Environmental Education Ometepe, which works with children and young people on the island in environmental awareness-raising campaigns.

When Paladino learned about the work of the recyclers, she got students and teachers in local schools to support their cause, organising clean-up days to collect waste which is donated to the women’s garbage collection and classification centre.

Ometepe is a 276-sq-km natural island paradise in the middle of the 8,624-km Lake Nicaragua or Cocibolca, in the west of this Central American nation of 6.1 million people.

Not everything is peaches and cream

Of the 10 women who started the collective – now the Association of Women Recyclers of Altagracia – six are left.

They continue to scavenge for recyclable waste material, removing it from the island and shipping it to Managua, where it is sold. They make enough for their families to scrape by.

Gutiérrez said the mission has been difficult because of the high cost of transport, the job insecurity, and the scant financing they have found.

“We have always had support, thank God; the city government supported us, some hotels have too, people from the European Union gave us funds for improving the conditions of the landfill,” she said.

“But we need more funds, to be able to collect and transport the material, process it, and remove it from the island,” she added.

Students and mothers from a school in the city of Altagracia make wastepaper bins using disposable bottles. It is one of the numerous recycling initiatives that have emerged on the island of Ometepe in Nicaragua, inspired by a group of women who organised to collect and process garbage. Credit: Karin Paladino/IPS

With backing from the EU, the city government of Moyogalpa was able to improve the garbage dumps of the island’s two municipalities. Now there are large sheds in both dumps, where organic material is treated, as well as containers for producing organic compost using worms, and rainwater collection tanks.

The two municipalities also gave the recyclers plots of land for growing their own vegetables and grains for their families.

But the efforts and the solidarity were not sufficient to keep some of the women from dropping out.

As global oil prices plunged, the value of waste products also dropped, and profits did the same, which discouraged some of the women who went back to what they used to do: combining farm work with domestic service.

“I was really committed to the work of collecting garbage, but all of a sudden I felt that the project wasn’t doing well and I needed to feed my family, so I went with my husband to plant beans and vegetables to earn a better income,” María, one of the former members, told IPS.

“But I still collect waste products anyway, and although I’m not participating anymore, I donate them to my former mates in the collective,” said María, who did not give her last name.

But while some of the women dropped out, others joined. “The waste keeps pouring in, and support for our work is going to grow. Our families back us and we are enthusiastic,” one of the new women, Eveling Urtecho, told IPS.

With Gutiérrez’s leadership, backing from the city government, and renewed assistance from the EU, the women are confident that their incomes and working conditions will soon improve.

Ometepe – which means ‘two mountains’ in the Nahuatl tongue – is visited by an average of 50,000 tourists a year, and at least 10 million tons of plastic enter the island annually, according to figures from local environmental groups.

The association of Altagracia gathers between 1,000 and 1,200 kg of plastic a month, and their counterparts in Moyogalpa collect a similar amount.

Until the women launched their revolution, most of the waste in Ometepe ended up strewn about on the streets, in rivers and in backyards, or was burnt in huge piles. When it rained, the water would wash the refuse into the lake.

This reporting series was conceived in collaboration with Ecosocialist Horizons

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The Khalife family’s glassblowing workshop in the southern coastal village of Sarafand, Lebanon, has been given a new lease of life thanks to an initiative for recycling waste glass normally destined for landfills. Credit: Oriol Andrés Gallart/IPS

By Oriol Andrés Gallart
BEIRUT, Apr 5 2015 (IPS)

In the Khalife workshop, in the southern coastal village of Sarafand, four men stand beside an oven, fixed in concentration despite the oppressive temperature. Blowing through a long tube, one of the group carefully shapes white-hot melted glass into a small ball, while two others coax it into the form of a beer glass. The fourth, the veteran of the group, cuts off the top of the glass, creating an opening from which beer will one day flow.

Working in shifts, the members of Lebanon’s last dynasty of glass blowers work tirelessly day and night to ensure customers receive their products on time. Currently they are in the process of producing 133,000 artisan glasses commissioned by Almaza, a subsidiary of Heineken, and the most popular beer in Lebanon.

When Ziad Abichaker phoned the Khalife family two years ago, they could not even dream of an order of such a size. The workshop’s oven had been idle for five months and the business was about to close.The Khalife family’s glassblowing workshop had relied heavily on Lebanon’s tourism industry to generate profits, but that was before the number of tourists started drying up due to fallout from the conflict in Syria.

As manager Hussein Khalife explains, the workshop had relied heavily on Lebanon’s tourism industry to generate profits, but that was before the number of tourists started drying up due to fallout from the conflict in Syria.

However, Abichaker, a multi-disciplinary engineer and owner of Cedar Environmental, an environmental and industrial engineering organisation that aims to build recycling plants to produce organically certified fertilisers, saw an opportunity to revive the family business.

During the July 2006 war in Lebanon, Israeli airstrikes destroyed the country’s only green glass manufacturing plant, located in the Bekaa valley. Lacking investors to pump in the about 40 million dollars necessary to rebuild it, the plant has remained in a state of disrepair and as a consequence, local beer and wine companies have become reliant on importing their bottles.

Abichaker – who operates ten municipal waste management plants through Cedar Environmental which had previously supplied the Bekaa glass plant – began stockpiling glass rather than see it end up in Lebanon’s landfills.

“Around 71 million bottles end up in the landfills per year,” says Abichaker. “All the green glass that we sorted from the waste management plants had nowhere to go. I didn’t want to throw it away, so we started stocking the bottles while thinking of a solution”.  By the time Abichaker started working with Hussein Khalife in 2013, he had already stocked around 60 tonnes of beer bottles.

Together, they began working on a solution that would give new life to all the stocked glass, and also save the Khalife business. After putting together a business plan, they decided to create a number of new glass designs with a chic and modern finish as well as create more niche sales points.

Besides glasses, the business plan also called for the production of cups, vases and lamps whose bases are made from recycled wood.

Known as the Green Glass Recycling Initiative – Lebanon (GGRIL), Abichaker explains that for Cedar Environmental, the project is a non-profit initiative. “Eighty percent of the revenues go back to the Khalife glass blowers and the remaining 20 percent to the retailer. What we gain as Cedar Environmental is that they take all the green glass from our plants. So we still maintain zero waste status in our recycling plants.”

Today, the initiative’s products are on sale in ten different locations in Beirut, including restaurants, alternative galleries and gift shops, and recently Abichaker and Khalife also started selling them online.

Hussein Khalife shows his satisfaction at being able to preserve the family’s artisan business, the legacy of generations of glass blowers. “When Ziad [Abichaker] proposed creating new designs, we decided to go ahead,” says Khalife. “It was a risk for us but it was worth it.”

After closing 2014 over 42,000 dollars up on sales, the Almaza order – GGRI’s biggest to date – came through and Abichaker is adamant that it will not be a one-off.

The most recent step for the fledgling initiative was to raise funds to purchase a truck to pick up used glasses from bins they plan to place around some of Beirut’s more popular nightspots. A crowd-funding project last year raised 30,000 dollars.

“I think that by the end of 2015 we will have diverted one million beer bottles from landfills,” estimates Abichaker, but while this is a considerable amount, it constitutes only a tiny portion of the 1.57 million of tonnes of solid waste that Lebanon produces per year, according to a 2010 report from SWEEP-Net, a regional solid waste exchange of information and expertise network in Mashreq and Maghreb countries.

Currently, most of Lebanon’s green glass ends up in the landfill of the coastal municipality of Naameh, a town just south of Beirut. Created in 1997, the landfill was only meant to be active for six years due to environmental concerns. However, 18 years later it is still in use. Once again scheduled to close in January this year, the Lebanese government approved an extensions of the deadline for three months due to the absence of an alternative site.

“It is a catastrophe there, it is overfull”, says Paul Abi Rached, president of the Lebanese environmental non-governmental organisation TERRE Liban. “You have big impacts on air pollution, climate change. In particular,  leachate – the liquid that drains from a landfill – is being thrown into the Mediterranean Sea.”

Abi Rached criticises the government for a perceived lack of commitment to developing recycling policies. The government, notes Abi Rached, award contracts to private sector waste management companies without prioritising environmentally friendly methods.

In addition to the shortcomings of governmental waste-management programs, Abichaker argues that it is absolutely necessary to raise the general public’s awareness of the importance of protecting the environment.

“Now people are becoming more aware that they should safeguard their environment because they have realised that it affects their own health, their own habitat,” he says, “but we still have a long way to go.”

Edited by Phil Harris

Local communities in India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands (ANI) have grown accustomed to modern water and sanitation infrastructure in the decade since the Asian Tsunami. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
CAR NICOBAR, India, Sep 5 2014 (IPS)

When the 2004 Asian Tsunami lashed the coasts and island territories of India, one of the hardest hit areas were the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (ANI), which lie due east of mainland India, at the juncture of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea.

Remote and isolated, the tribal communities that occupy these idyllic isles have lived for centuries off the land, eschewing all forms of modern ‘development’ and sustaining themselves off the catch from the rich seas that surround them.

But when the tsunami struck without warning on Boxing Day, and traditional wooden houses erected on bamboo stilts were washed away, surviving commuties scattered across these islands have been forced to reckon with their primitive lifestyle and open the doors to some changes, especially in Car Nicobar, capital and administrative nerve-centre of the Nicobar Islands.

One of the most notable changes has been in the realm of sanitation, hitherto an unhealthy mix of open defacation and forest-based waste management.

Before a major relief and rehabiliation operation got underway in the aftermath of the tsunami, many tribal communities in Nicobarese villages had rejected potable water schemes such as the desalination plant installed in the village of Chaura, where the population of 1,214 people expressed hesitation about drinking water “from a machine”.

Toilet facilities were also extremely limited, with most residents “answering nature’s call by going behind a bush”, according to a sports ministry official from the division of Kakana who gave his name only as Benedict.

When IPS visited an interim tsunami shelter in Kakana, Car Nicobar, in 2007, 25 months after the tsunami, the situation had scarcely improved. A hole in the ground across from the relief shelter served as a communal facility, and could only be accessed by leaping onto a mound of dug-up earth and navigating the moist forest floor, hoping to avoid an encounter with snakes en route to the bathroom.

The ‘structure’ consisted of nothing more than a deep hole in the forest floor, covered on all four sides by plastic sheeting. It lacked a roof, a tap and a light.

Locals were still trying to come to terms with the fact that their freshwater supply, once a boundless natural bounty originating from springs in the volcanic islands, had become badly polluted after the natural catastrophe.

A World Health Organisation (WHO) report on sanitation prospects on the island in early 2005 found several cases of diarrhoeal outbreak among survivors housed in temporary camps, which affected hundreds of the roughly 1,300 residents.

Now, most villages have toilets and sanitation systems in individual homes, and locals are slowly opening up to the necessity of improved waste-management systems. IPS interviewed tsunami survivors across five Nicobar islands – Car Nicobar, Kamorta, Campbell Bay, Little Nicobar, and Katchall – who expressed the universal opinion that receiving access to water and sanitation facilities, as well as permanent shelters designed and constructed by the government of India, has done them good.

“There are a few issues like water scarcity and discomfort in the humid summer months,” said 46-year-old Muneer Ahmed, chief tribal captain in Pilpillow, Kamorta. “Zinc sheet roofing and concrete houses are tough as they are weather insenstive, compared to weather-sensitive straw huts.”

“But,” he told IPS, “We are grateful for greater security.” His words reflect a prevailing attitude across the islands that returning to flimsy thatched-roof homes – despite their proximity to the beach, which most Nicobarese depend on for sustenance – is simply not an option with the memory of the killer waves still fresh in the minds of the survivors.

The same holds true for water and sanitation. Local communities now get water from infrastructure provided by the Public Works Department, Sakshi Mittal, deputy commissioner of Nicobar, told IPS, adding, “They don’t reject this supply anymore.”

Coastal fisherfolk in Tamil Nadu’s tsunami battered coasts of Nagapatnam and Cuddalore are also benefiting from similar schemes, many of them overseen by the Swiss Development Agency. “We have tiled bathrooms with ventilation and western toilets with bidets,” a fisherwoman named Vanitha in Nagapatnam told IPS.

Such developments among fisher communities are crucial as the international community finalises a new roadmap for sustainable development that will replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015.

Key among the new poverty eradication targets, known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), will be the inclusion of the most marginalised segments of society.

In India, this includes fisher communities who were the worst hit in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry, with about 150,000 fisherfolk losing their homes to the tsunami. In ANI, close to 10,000 people lost their lives and and scores more were exposed to tough living conditions.

Despite construction by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) of 8,500 latrines around the islands after the tsunami, there remains a 35 percent deficit of decent sanitation facilities today.

In general, health indicators among the islands’ tribal population are higher than in other parts of India, with a maternal mortality ratio far below the national average of 250 deaths per 100,000 live births.

Although other health indicators like life expectancy rates were higher in the states of Kerala and ANI (67.6 percent and 73.4 percent respectively), the tsunami brought fresh new troubles, such as fears of malaria outbreaks, or epidemics of vector-borne diseases like dengue.

Relief workers and emergency response teams, sponsored by the government, international NGOs and the United Nations, took the lead on eradicating mosquito breeding grounds, distributing bednets, spraying insecticide in mosquito-heavy areas, as well as stocking local water bodies with a species of fish with an appetite for mosquito larvae.

According to a WHO assessment a year after the tsunami, Indian health authorities also launched measles vaccinations campaigns in the areas hardest hit by the disaster, namely the state of Tamil Nadu and the union territory of ANI, boosting measles immunisation coverage to 96.3 percent in the latter.

While they hope against hope to be spared another disaster, some of India’s most vulnerable communities are today far more resilient than they were a decade ago.

Part 1 of this series can be read here.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Excerpt:

Slum populations in the developing world have increased from 650 million in 1990 to 863 million in 2012. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Kalinga Seneviratne
SINGAPORE, Jun 5 2014 (IPS)

With over 20,000 international participants, a triple summit wrapping up today in Singapore is generating an abundance of ideas on sustainable cities.

Combining the World City Summit, Singapore Water Week and the CleanEnviro Summit into one mega-event (at one venue), the country has brought together urban policy-makers, environmentalists, water experts and business people to discuss the future of urban planning, even as U.N.-Habitat warns that the number of city dwellers could double by 2050 to nearly 6.5 billion people.

“Unless we make a concerted effort to change the way we live and operate, the world is on course to enter uncharted, potentially dangerous territory,” warned Choi Shing Kwok, permanent secretary of Singapore’s ministry of the environment and water resources, addressing a Business Forum at the World Cities Summit here this week.

One of the major themes on the table has been the issue of environmental sustainability and the urgent need for better communication between local government authorities and community members to create more transparent and participatory governance at the grassroots level.

“Unless we make a concerted effort to change the way we live and operate, the world is on course to enter uncharted, potentially dangerous territory." -- Choi Shing Kwok, permanent secretary of Singapore’s ministry of the environment and water resources
Few can miss the significance of Singapore as a location for the triple-header: an island nation of four million people, it is now among the world’s top three richest countries in terms of gross domestic product (GDP), clocking roughly 274.7 billion dollars in 2012, according to the World Bank.

A highly advanced developed nation with sound environmental policies, the Southeast Asian country is always proud to showcase its journey from a third world to a first world country within a single generation as a model for others to emulate.

In a nod to his government’s decision to host the gathering for the second year running, Kwok told the 130 mayors present at the conference, “Governments have an important role to play in steering national development through good public policies and by working with people and private sectors to shape their countries’ future.”

The U.N. estimates that 96 percent of urban growth in the next three decades will take place in developing countries, many of which are already straining to effectively manage their bulging metropolises.

Slum populations in the developing world have increased in number from 650 million in 1990 to 863 million in 2012. More than half of these slum dwellers reside in Asia.

Asia is also expected to shoulder the lion’s share of the burden of city planning, being home to 56 percent of the world’s largest cities, including seven of the top 10 megacities (with populations of over 10 million people).

Most officials are agreed that tackling the challenge of urban growth will require a multi-sector approach that mobilises electronics and technology in the service of poverty reduction and environmental sustainability.

Bindu Lohani, vice president of knowledge management and sustainable development at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) believes that, in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), emphasis must be placed on developing “local governments as the delivery agents of basic services.”

He added that municipal governments in the developing world face enormous challenges due to a lack of autonomy in urban planning, and limited avenues through which to raise financial resources.

China has made strides in overcoming these obstacles, according to Qiu Aijun, deputy director-general of China’s Center for Urban Development.

She drew attention to three rural towns – Longgang, Baigou and Huixian – that have developed into cities in the past 10 to 20 years because the Chinese authorities eliminated multi-tiered approval systems and adopted one localised system for processing community development projects and businesses.

“As grassroots governments did not have approval rights, we reformed laws to give them those rights. Instead of needing eight different chops [approval stamps] to start a business, you now need just one,” she explained.

Several of the mayors in attendance at the summit advocated using social media as a tool in building a sustainable future.

Among them was Ridwan Kamil, mayor of Bandung, Indonesia’s third largest city, who interacts with the community through Twitter, where he currently has 545,000 followers; he has also convinced city officials and other departments to create their own social media accounts.

“In future, a majority of the city’s programmes will be run collaboratively, where citizens participate in improving the quality of public services,” Kamil stressed during a forum discussion earlier this week.

Clover Moore, lord mayor of Sydney, echoed his sentiment, arguing that mainstream media’s focus on negatives could be easily overcome by embarking on smart social media campaigns.

“People don’t want change, [so] we need to take people through change,” argued Moore at a panel discussion entitled ‘Way Forward’. Her campaign to make Sydney a more bike-friendly and pedestrian-friendly city, she said, took years of communicating with the community before people changed their ways.

Others stressed that new forms of communication must be deployed in tandem with the building of solid infrastructure.

As Anibal Gaviria Correa, mayor of Colombia’s second-largest city, Medellin, pointed out, extending public transport systems to the most marginalised suburbs helped to reduce the soaring crime rate in what was once considered the world’s most violent urban center, with a homicide rate of 380 per 100,000 in 1991.

“This allowed the city’s poorest residents to access education, jobs and public spaces, helping in social upliftment, and building a more inclusive society,” he noted. Though still high, homicide rates in Medellin fell by 50 percent between 1990 and 2000.

Waste management was another major issue under the microscope here this week, particularly for the governments of Asian countries, many of which lack effective recycling, treatment and disposal systems.

For instance, only 14 percent of Indonesia’s wastewater is treated, while that number falls to 10 percent in the Philippines, nine percent in India and just four percent in Vietnam.

According to the Asian Development Bank, 23 percent of the population (roughly 850 million people) in the Asia-Pacific Region practice open defecation, causing water and ground pollution and leading to the outbreak of diarrhoeal diseases.

A mere 10 percent of solid waste generated in Asian towns and cities winds up in poorly managed landfill sites.

In an interview with the conference newspaper ‘Solutions’, Chen Hung-Yi, of the Environmental Protection Administration of Taiwan, said that governments should introduce financial incentives for people to generate less waste and thus reduce reliance on landfills.

“In Taiwan, households and businesses are charged for garbage collection, while recycling is free,” Chen said, arguing that such a system will soon prompt people to take more responsibility for their solid waste.

South Korea and Japan have adopted a similar system, though China is yet to follow suit, even though the country is the world’s leading generator of municipal solid waste, creating 150 million tons annually.

The United Nations estimates that cities will generate more than half the rise in greenhouse gas emissions over the next 20 years, highlighting the urgent need for communication and action on smart urban planning.

(END)

Palestinian child on donkey cart next to garbage container in Gaza City. Credit: Mohammed Omer/IPS

By Mohammed Omer
GAZA CITY , Dec 5 2013 (IPS)

The garbage trucks of Gaza city are at a standstill due to an ongoing fuel shortage affecting all aspects of daily life, including garbage collection, sewage and waste disposal and other vital services. But the local donkeys are here to help.

Abu Hesham on his donkey cart won’t be able to clear all the streets of garbage. In Gaza’s Barcelona neighbourhood, trash bins are overflowing – a common sight since fuel for motor vehicles became scarce – and as the 33-year-old donkey cart owner approaches the garbage dump, there is no space left and no option but to throw the trash out on the side of the road.

“What else can I do?” he tells IPS as he carries sacks of waste at 7:00 AM through Gaza’s misty weather.

The smell of rotting garbage is getting worse and worse. The people in Gaza attempt to burn the garbage to reduce the quantity and minimise the risk of infection, so the air is filled with black smoke too. Right now, breathing fresh air is not an option for most people in Gaza, whether children or adults.

The municipality, administered by Gaza’s de facto government, is stuck between the ongoing Israeli siege, the ruling Hamas’ rival Fatah, and Egypt’s new military regime.

Mahmoud Abu Jabal, 55, travels on his donkey through Gaza’s city streets. His barefoot son, 10-year-old Ala’a Abu Jabal, follows behind between piles of garbage scattered across the streets.

The Gaza municipality announced that fuel supplies for their trucks had run out and they couldn’t afford the more expensive fuel.

In the past few years, the war-torn Gaza Strip relied on Egyptian fuel at 3.5 Israeli shekels (one dollar) per litre. Then in July, Egypt closed down all supply tunnels to Gaza in an attempt to crush the Hamas Islamic movement for being an ally to overthrown Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi (2012-2013). The municipality says that fuel coming through Israel is heavily taxed, forcing them to pay double, at 7.0 Israeli shekels per litre.

Abu Jabal’s work has become more demanding in the last two weeks. His previous route was around one of Gaza’s main hospitals, but now he and his donkey and his son must collect garbage from throughout Gaza City.

“This is my only source of income to feed my 12 children and the donkey,” he says.

Abu Jabal is sick, and can find no other job when the garbage trucks are up and running. He earns about 700 Israeli shekels (200 dollars), although it doesn’t cover all his family’s needs.

The minister of local government in Gaza, Mohammed Al-Farra, standing alongside one of Gaza’s largest garbage dumps close to the Yarmouk soccer field in central Gaza City, told a press conference, “All of the garbage trucks, which collect about 1,700 tonnes of waste a day, have stopped.”

In order to keep Gaza’s streets clean, it takes 150,000 litres of fuel a month to run the garbage trucks. Not to mention the 7,000 litres of diesel to provide clean water and sanitation.

Between the villages and camps, Palestinians can find nowhere else to put their garbage except along the roads or at random garbage sites in residential areas. According to Al-Farra, this could lead to the spread of bacteria, diseases and epidemics.

But the fuel shortage is not only causing the garbage overflow. Gaza’s main power plant has no fuel, leaving all Gazans in an energy blackout for up to 18 hours a day. Families have no heat, light or cooking facilities and are surrounded by rotting garbage.

Further north in the Gaza Strip, in Beit Lahia, health officials warned that a potential environmental disaster is imminent if flooding occurs due to the power outages, says Mayor Khalil Matar.

Almost 30,000 cups of wastewater are being dumped into Beit Lahia’s sewage tank and power cuts of 18 hours per day could well cause the sewage to flood into neighbouring areas, where clinics are threatened too. The ministry is no longer able to afford to pay its workers wages due to financial difficulties, Matar says.

In 2007, the sewage-disposal pool collapsed, and residential areas were flooded, killing four Palestinians and destroying crops.

Matar has appealed to Arab and international groups to urgently intervene and help his city overcome the crisis and prevent further suffering.

Local and international human rights groups have expressed concern about potential environmental disasters. United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Robert Serry told a news conference in northern Gaza that Turkey would donate fuel as a temporary solution.

The municipal authorities in Gaza City received 16,700 litres of fuel. Officials say the amount is only enough for a few days.

Dozens of homes of Palestinian refugees have been flooded in Gaza due to heavy rain. Rescue teams have been evacuating families in different locations after sewage systems flooded Wednesday morning.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said that 19 of its 20 construction projects in Gaza had ground to a halt because of an Israeli block on building materials.

Gaza’s de facto government announced it would deduct from the wages of its staff members in order to employ 430 workers to collect garbage using 250 extra donkey carts, one of which is driven by Abu Jabal.

The workers’ job begins at 4:00 AM, when the noise of donkeys pulling carts begins to echo through the streets – and by noon they have collected all they can find.

Abdel Rahim Abu al-Komboz, general director of health and environment in Gaza municipality, says “We are experiencing a crisis.” He said the problem has been aggravated as people are using undesignated locations for dumping waste in the crowded Gaza Strip, which is home to 1.8 million Palestinians.

“When the economy comes to a halt, unemployment rates increase, which means people cannot pay their bills for services, leaving only 10-15 percent of the population who can pay,” Abu al-Komboz says.

When the supply tunnels were active, bringing in tuck-tucks (three-wheel motorcycles), many Palestinians joked about the tasks of donkey carts being replaced by tuck-tucks, which need limited care. However, the tuck-tucks are out of fuel now and the donkeys with their cart owners are back on the streets of Gaza, to help as best they can.

The garbage collector may only earn around 200 dollars to feed a whole family, but at least he can open a bag of garbage on his cart and pull out discarded food to feed his donkey.

But the potential health threats to Gaza are still unaddressed, including the contamination of groundwater, scavengers, stray dogs and rodents.

Christina E. is a mother of three who lives in an apartment building in an upscale neighbourhood in Paris. As someone who prepares meals daily, she wishes she had a place besides her household garbage bin where she could put biodegradable waste.

“I feel bad every time I have to throw out vegetable or fruit peels or other organic matter,” she told IPS. “I grew up seeing my family using a compost heap and if I knew of any collective bins in Paris, I would definitely use them.”

Collective compost bins in the town of Besancon. Credit: Jean-Charles Sexe/Ville de Besançon.

If Christina lived in Besançon, a picturesque town in eastern France, she would be able to put her biodegradable waste in a bin provided by the city, and she could even “recuperate” the compost to nurture the plants on her balcony. She could also get a chicken from the town to peck away at the waste.

Located 325 kilometres from the French capital, Besançon is known as the environmental and energy-saving “champion” of France. The area boasts a stunning hilltop citadel – a UNESCO World Heritage site, in fact. It also has the highest amount of social housing of French cities.

As such, it has made noteworthy efforts to involve residents in its environmental actions and plans to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions by 20 percent by the year 2020, which is also a European Union goal.

“From the beginning, we’ve had a big awareness campaign so that people understand all the steps we’re taking. It’s a participative effort. The citizens are totally involved and understand the objective of cutting energy consumption by 20 percent,” said Nicolas Guillemet, vice president of the greater Besançon area in charge of sustainable development of the environment and quality of life.

In addition to providing compost bins to residential buildings and to private homes with space or a garden, the city also collects the compost and uses it to fertilise public parks and other green spaces. Enterprising residents can also accept a chicken from the town to help consume organic waste.

But this support is only a small part of the environmental efforts being taken by this population of 180,000. Since the town’s priority is to reduce energy as well as cut greenhouse gases, everyone has a role to play, said Guillemet.

Each year, the town “follows” a hundred or so families, studying their daily modes of transportation, their home-heating methods, and other habits. The research is aimed at showing individuals how they can change their actions to use less energy, Guillemet told IPS."It's a participative effort. The citizens are totally involved."
-- Nicolas Guillemet

At the end of the study, the findings are released to the public so that others can make similar behavioural changes, he said.

If carrots fail to entice residents, there’s always the stick, where the town adopts tougher measures to motivate residents. Household waste, for instance, is taxed according to how much it weighs – the less waste one produces, the less one pays.

These measures have resulted in a 15 percent reduction of the waste collected for incineration, according to the office of Mayor Jean-Louis Fousseret, a Socialist.

Fousseret is one of the driving forces behind the many changes in the town, but his policies are not without controversy. He has been criticised by opposition politicians for overspending.

A new tramway in the town, scheduled for completion next year, for instance, cost 250 million euros and has caused residents much inconvenience over the past several months. And changing the public street lighting system to use LED bulbs costs 1 million euros a year, according to officials. The estimated savings, however, are 5 million euros annually.

“It’s easy to respond to critics who say we’re spending too much because, yes, it’s a lot of money invested initially,” Guillemet told IPS. “But afterwards, there is a great deal of savings realised. The tramway, for instance, costs millions to create, but it lasts 50 years or more. The same with energy savings.”

“Sustainable development is about long-term vision,” he added. “We’re investing today but it’s for tomorrow and after tomorrow.”

Besançon officials say they were inspired by Germany and Switzerland, which are “way ahead of France” in terms of sustainable energy policy. The town lies close to the borders with these countries, and strong ecology alliances have developed over the years. With German and Swiss help, Besançon has become an example to other French towns, officials say.

At the end of 2012, the city was awarded the “Gold Prize” of the Cit’ergie European Energy Award for “exemplary” achievements in climate and energy action, the first French town to be so honoured.

Despite Besançon’s progress, some experts fear that the town still faces an uphill battle to reduce energy consumption by 20 percent over the next seven years.

“I don’t think we’ll make it if we don’t take more innovative steps,” said Benoit Cypriani, a representative of the green party Groupe Europe-Ecologie Les Verts.

“It’s definitely achievable in the public sector, but things will be more difficult in the private sector where houses need to be renovated to be more energy efficient, for example,” he told IPS.

Cypriani said he hoped the tramway would have an effect on the two-percent increase in “déplacement” (transportation) that the town has witnessed, mostly involving cars. He hopes, too, that at the national level, the French government will take steps to reduce electricity use that will have an effect on Besançon.

France is Europe’s leading consumer of electricity for home heating, but Cypriani believes that wood should be promoted more, as it creates less pollution.

In Besançon’s manual of priorities, cutting energy consumption must be followed by producing energy on a local level.

“We want to be self-sufficient in the territory, and that means renewable energy,” Guillemet told IPS. The town is currently investing in photovoltaic panels and assisting residents who want to install photovoltaic or photo-thermal panels on their own property, he said.

Besançon officials have further identified a wind-energy zone and, in four years, an aeolian (wind) energy plan should be implemented. Water is also being explored as an energy source, as the town lies cradled in the loop of the Doubs River, and there are plans to continue using wood in two communal wood-burning heaters.

386 teams in Warangal recently competed for the ‘best performance’ trophy in collection and disposal of household wastes. Credit: Keya Acharya/IPS

By Keya Acharya
WARANGAL, India, Nov 22 2012 (IPS)

In a country notorious for the inability to deal with the waste it generates, municipal officials in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh are now resorting to making waste management a competitive sport, in their bid to cajole the entire nation to clean up.

The historic city of Warangal recently hosted 386 teams from 57 municipalities across the northern half of Andhra Pradesh – the largest state in south India and the fourth largest in the country – competing for the ‘best performance’ trophy in collection and disposal of household wastes.

“I found this an opportunity to learn; I too wanted to know how to get it done,” said Warangal city’s municipal commissioner, Vivek Yadav. Warangal’s population of 600,000 produces 300 metric tonnes of household waste daily.

Waste segregation and recycling might be ‘old hat’ in most countries, but in India, where cities are growing exponentially, negligence, administrative mismanagement and lack of infrastructure have resulted in open dumping in over 90 percent of cities and towns countrywide.

The Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi estimates that by 2047, waste generation across India’s cities will reach 260 million tonnes per year.

In 2000, in response to a petition filed by Almitra Patel, a Bangalore-based civil engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Supreme Court made it mandatory for the country’s municipalities to take responsibility for the safe disposal of its wastes.

But implementation of the Municipal Solid Waste Management Rules has been poor.

The idea of handling waste management through sport came to environmental activist Uday Singh after watching an Indian Premier League cricket game.

“We wanted to try and harness the spirit of competition and sportsmanship that India displays in cricket, for public health,” Singh said.

The force for the ‘Clean Cities Championships’, however, was Andhra Pradesh Joint Director of Municipal Administration, Khadar Saheb, the man behind India’s first ‘waste-compliant’ city, Suryapet, in 2003.

Intense pre-competition activity saw routes being mapped, household segregation being explained to citizens and training of staff.

Each team thereafter consisted of a guest municipality’s Sanitary Inspector as team leader and two guest staff accompanied by three officials from the host city.

Pushing trolleys door to door between the hours of seven and eleven every morning, each team was given a score based on how it handled the collection process.

Teams unloaded trolleys full of waste at the collection centre in the town’s water tower premises before continuing on their rounds.

Collection staff varied from municipal tractor-drivers and cleaners to garbage-pickers employed by the municipality.

“The aim was to train all municipal staff so that they go back to their constituencies and spread awareness,” Saheb told IPS.

Plastics went to a storage yard for collection by recycling units, wet wastes went to a dumpsite 15 kilometres outside the city, while scraps from the city’s two main markets went directly for vermicomposting.

The competition caught the attention of a large swathe of the city’s residents.

At the sound of the teams’ whistle each morning, housewives came to the doors of their homes located along the ancient, winding lanes of the old city, once part of the fort belonging to the Kakatiya dynasty that ruled most of present-day Andhra Pradesh from the 12^th to 14^th century.

Sixty-one-year-old Sultana Begum and her tenant, 32-year-old Rani, were unsure of exactly how their segregated wastes were being disposed of, but did not hesitate in proclaming the process a “good thing”, a sentiment echoed by various other households throughout Warangal.

But not everyone was excited about the model.

The exclusion of ‘ragpickers’, India’s garbage-sorters who make a living by reselling plastics retrieved from garbage, posed a serious challenge to dissemination of information and training, though Singh, the ‘hub man’ of the operation, says the ragpickers will get inducted into the recycling system in due course.

Others are disgruntled too. Those who wore protective gloves complained they got damp and were uncomfortable; those who didn’t receive any, due to inadequacies in distribution, were aggrieved at being left out.

At the dry collection centre, the city’s Sanitary Inspector kept a critical eye on the sorting and packing of plastics, labelling the process “too risky”.

But Joint Director Saheb and Commissioner Yadav heard the string of complaints with quiet composure and unwavering determination.

“It’s a brave attempt,” said Supreme Court Solid Waste Committee specialist Patel, who had been invited to the event as a guest of honour.

“This message needs to snowball,” she told IPS.

The prize for best team was awarded to the Khammam municipality, while several others received a slew of consolation prizes. “There are no losers in this game,” Singh stressed.

The competition will now be taken to several other cities in Andhra Pradesh.

(END)