Suleja’s mounting refuse

The town which is located in Niger State is regarded as the gateway to the FCT and houses a significant proportion of the workers in Abuja. Authorities there have been contending with how best to manage the voluminous waste generated by the ever increasing population.At most of the designated locations where waste collection bins were […]

The town which is located in Niger State is regarded as the gateway to the FCT and houses a significant proportion of the workers in Abuja. Authorities there have been contending with how best to manage the voluminous waste generated by the ever increasing population.
At most of the designated locations where waste collection bins were placed, they are always spilling with contents dumped from evening to morning.
The waste, Daily Trust found, is so enormous that, a new comer would think that the refuse were not even being collected.
A resident described the waste generation in Suleja as enormous, saying that, there are so many people living in the town, therefore the amount of solid waste generated in the area is not surprising, coupled with the fact that it is a big business hub, where many activities were carried out.
Around the business places and markets located in the town, boys some less than 12 years old are always seen conveying garbage from the markets and other places including homes to the waste bins, from where disposal trucks and tippers load them and take them to the dump sites.
The dump site located about three kilometres outside the town is another area of activities as scavengers are at hand to shred any waste to pieces in their search for valuables.
The huge refuse generation, experts said was not restricted to Suleja alone, adding that waste generation, especially solid waste was always proportional to the expansion and development of human settlements.
One of the experts, Dr Okon Adeyi noted that: “In Nigerian urban centres, where tonnes of solid waste per household is not properly documented and absence of proper statistical backing to ascertain the volume of the waste generated in each urban household, it is hard to know how many tonnes of solid waste is being generated in the densely populated cities of the country.
In cities like Lagos and Kano, tonnes of solid waste are being churned out daily from households, industries and around business places in and around the cities.”
Plastic bottles, beverage cans, polythene bags used in packaging which form about 40 percent of the total solid waste generated in our cities litter the streets, he added.