Road Cleaners - The Problems With Refuse Disposal And Dumping – Lagos City

ketcom (72)in #life • 5 years ago

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Lagos City Source

Managing human waste both domestic and industrial is a challenge many urban cities are contending with because not doing so can lead to epidemic outbreak which in turn can lead to heavy loss of lives. While some cities have come up with a lot of innovations that is making waste management a big source of revenue, others are still battling with how to contend with the overwhelming challenges it is bringing forth.

Rural Settlement Management

While waste management is a problem for mankind generally, people living rural areas seem to be doing better at managing waste due to the fact that they product less waste that are harmful to the environment, have a lot of vegetation that help produce more oxygen which is useful to man and they recycle a lot of their waste for which part of it are used as manure for plants.

Urban Settlement Management

People in urban areas tend to cut down trees that are useful to man and replace the trees with a lot of skyscrapers. The little spaces on the ground that don’t have buildings are cast with concrete. This action reduces our chances of getting naturally produced oxygen from plants. City dwellers also use things that are mostly packaged in plastic, paper, bottle and other containers that are difficult to dispose of. Some of the wastes from the big cities are dumped into the sea/ ocean which breed another set of problems.

Waste Management In Lagos

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Lagos City – A crowded City Source

Lagos is a port city that has over 20 million people living in it. It was the former capital of the country before the capital was moved to Abuja. The city borders the Atlantic Ocean in the south, Benin Republic in the west and Ogun State in the North and Eastern borders.

While the government is doing a lot to manage the waste produced by the inhabitants of the city, the inhabitants themselves are really not making it easy for waste to be properly managed. A lot of people have so much bad habits and disregard for the law that they are just too lazy to separate there waste in terms of perishable and non-perishable, cans, plastics and glasses. People keep dumping waste indiscriminately during odd hour so that the authorities don’t catch them while they are doing it.

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Lagos City – The City With Yellow Buses Source

Road Cleaners In Lagos

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A Street Cleaner

The government employed road cleaners to keep our roads clean. Some people have a bad habit fond of throwing trash out of the windows of moving cars, others dump refuse indiscriminately and the flooding in Lagos doesn’t help matters at all, when heavy rain falls and there is flooding due to the fact that most of the drainage and gutters have been blocked by waste, the waste is sent by the flood water back to the roads.

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Abandoned Waste

The road cleaners clean the roads and stack most of the waste in bags waiting for the dump trucks to come pick them up. Unfortunately, the dump truck guys don’t always come on time or the same day to pick the waste. This gives some residents the opportunity to throw their own trash where the cleaners dumped theirs and before you know it, we have a mighty stack of rubbish all over the place. The worst part of it is that with time the wind opens up nylons that were not well closed and this spills the waste on the road.

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The waste is building up

Recycling – Turning Waste To Wealth

The government some time back had introduced the idea of recycling waste. This process was going to earn huge amount of money for both the government and partners. Recycling plants were going to be built but that project isn’t pushing very fast currently. The private sector in currently doing a bit of this, buying cans and plastics and recycling them to produce new product but the impact is not felt yet.

Conclusion

We all need to come together to fight this menace that can wipe out the whole city. We need to start planting trees, this the government is currently doing and they should be applauded for that, but unfortunately some of the residence are feeling the government is wasting money on trees instead of using to create things that will impact them positively, they need prepare education on the importance of trees in the environment. We need to recycle our waste and stop killing the planet. We should all play our part to make this would a better place for you and for me (a bit of Micheal Jackson there).

Picture credit: - All picture are mine except the ones a source is indicated.

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