The steadily increasing population has resulted in a number of solid and hazardous waste challenges in Karachi, a megacity. More than 22 million people live in Karachi. Six districts and seven cantonment regions make up Karachi. The DMC and the SSWMB (Sindh Solid Waste Management Board) are the two primary organisations responsible for managing solid waste and rubbish (District Municipal Committee). There are three stages in the city’s rubbish disposal process. FECs to GTS and GTS to LFS are the two primary stages of the city’s waste collection procedure.FEC (front-end collection), which is the collecting of trash from street cans and UC cans. Garbage transfer stations or GTS are large areas where waste collected from FECs is dumped. Recycling and other waste that should be buried under the ground, etc., should be sorted at the GTS. There are just two landfills in Karachi, Deh Pass Gondal and Deh Jam Chakro, both of which are on the Northern Bypass side and each cover 500 acres of land. There is a huge yellow garbage separating tractor there. The purpose of this device was to separate the plastic, paper, and glass after it had passed through it, however, there wasn’t much to separate as most of it is already sorted in the city before it is dumped in a landfill.

It all seems fine but in reality it is critically messed up. A long history of poor leadership and carelessness is to blame for Karachi’s appearance as a large rubbish island rather than a modern, clean port city. The fundamental problem is that whoever calculated Karachi’s daily garbage production be it the Sindh government, city mayor, DMCs, etc, they did it incorrectly. The primary reason is that it is improperly estimated. Planning to collect and dispose of trash always fails if the garbage production was incorrectly estimated. The primary issue is exacerbated by carelessness and substandard performance.

The daily production of home waste in Karachi is up to 16,000 M/tons; commercial and industrial waste contributes to this amount. Daily disposal figures at dump sites are between 7,000 and 8,000 M/tons. Where does the remaining trash go? It surrounds both you and me. in the shape of piles at the sides of the highways, dumps in the parks, the sides of the walls of schools and hospitals, and in the rain drains! The equipment at landfill sites is inadequate; currently, there is only one site operating with a single weighing station, which means that it can take up to 10 minutes for each dumper to empty. Even if it runs continuously, it can only discharge 220 dumpers at a time, or around 4,500 tonnes total.

Political instability is to blame for the government’s underwhelming performance in the area of solid waste management, which became a severe backlog issue during monsoon because sewage nalas (streams) are overflowing with waste and the drainage system failed during the rainy season, exposing the underwhelming performance of the municipal administration.

AMNA ZUBAIR,

Lahore.