YANGON would be a much cleaner city if citizens followed garbage disposal rules set by the Yangon City Development Committee (YCDC), an official from the committee’s Pollution Control and Cleansing Department said last week.

“If people would abide by the regulations for dumping set by the department, the city would be cleaner. We need people to cooperate and follow the rules to help clean up Yangon,” the official said.

He estimated that only about 10 percent of the city’s population disposed of trash properly.

“Most people know the rules but they don’t care. They think rubbish is YCDC’s problem because people pay monthly fees for trash collection. But cleaning up trash is efficient and convenient only when people dump trash according to the regulations,” he said.

The department’s garbage services include collecting rubbish along roads on a daily basis, “bell-ringing” service for collecting from homes, removing trash from authorised dumps, collecting waste from hospitals and on-call collecting from factories in industrial zones.

The official said the bell-ringing system is used to notify people in their homes that they can dump their garbage into a passing truck.

“If the streets are wide enough we use a dump truck. Otherwise we use a hand-pushed trolley,” he said.

People can leave trash at official dumps from 6pm to 6am. Since May the department has also left trolleys around the downtown area and along Baho Road where people can dump garbage. When the trolleys are full they are taken away and replaced with empty ones, the official said.

He said the department has established more than 1200 concrete dumps in the Yangon municipal area and has also installed trash bins at bus stops to make it convenient for passengers to throw their garbage away.

The official said the department often organises educational talks at state schools to teach students about the proper ways of disposing of garbage.
“People need to be reminded of the rules frequently,” he said.

Last year YCDC started imposing fines of K10,000 on pedestrians who dumped litter on sidewalks or streets in an effort to curb the city’s trash plague.
“We passed the rule but we are not enforcing it very strictly at the moment,” the official said.

Each year the department conducts a study of dumps established by YCDC. This year’s statistics have shown that each Yangon citizen disposes of an average of 0.278 kilograms of trash a day. About 3000 workers collect 1450 tonnes of trash daily from the city of nearly 6 million people.

Yangon resident U Thein Win, who lives in Bahan township and works downtown, said reckless garbage disposal can have a negative impact on the city’s image, especially among visiting foreigners.

“Everyone should be taught about proper garbage disposal starting from childhood,” he said.

He also suggested that YCDC put more and bigger rubbish bins around the city to make trash disposal more convenient.

“Authorities should strictly enforce anti-dumping laws because it’s getting out of hand,” said another Yangonite, Ko Zaw Oo from Yankin township. “I’ve seen people throwing trash from moving cars and even from the upper storeys of apartment buildings.”