Talking rubbish : "Honey, I shrunk the garbage"

"People who look down on garbage collectors should realise that to us they are garbage producers"- thoughts of a garbage collector.

With the mountains of garbage in all the major towns of the country rising sky - high, the Central Environmental Authority (CEA) seems to have used the above theory in finding a solution to the problem of disposing solid waste - tap the source of origin - the producers.

According to Nadula Abeysinghe, Senior Environmental Officer at the CEA, waste material should be sorted at the place it is produced, i.e in houses, restaurants, public parks etc, into bags of different colours.

Green for organic waste, blue for paper, red for glass bottles, brown for metals and coconut shells, orange for plastic and polythene. If everyone adheres to this system of colour codes, material like wastepaper, used bottles, plastic containers can be sent for recycling which would reduce the quantity of waste material that would end up as garbage.

It is said that sometime ago, the Colombo Municipal Council launched a Reduction, Re-use and Recycling of Waste program proposed by the National Strategy for Solid Waste Management. Before the project the Municipal Council garbage collection per day was 780 tons, but, after the beginning of the project a day's collection of garbage has been reduced to about 630 tons.

So, here's the best way to reduce those mountains of garbage at every nook and corner of the country. Shrink it.

Aditha

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Rotten truths

What is garbage?

Garbage is the stuff we don't need anymore, the junk we think is useless. It's the rejects we don't want to deal with, and the cast-offs from the way we live. It comes from our homes, businesses, government agencies, and institutions like schools and hospitals. Garbage is also known as "municipal solid waste."

Nature recycles

Our environment contains a limited amount of the nutrients that are necessary for life. These nutrients are "locked up" inside living things. Decay is nature's way of "unlocking" nutrients, and recycling them over and over again.

Because we don't like to watch (or smell) things decomposing, we sometimes have a bad habit of getting in the way of nature's recycling process (like when we put grass clippings into plastic bags and ship them to a landfill instead of adding them to a compost heap). If nothing were recycled, ultimately, all the nutrients would be used up, and there would be nothing left for new life.