A refuse dump in Tunisia. The overall health implications of this kind of web sites, which frequently incorporate chemical waste, have raised issues. Photograph: Jeremy Graham/Alamy
Salah Darghouth’s aggravation is visible. “You see that man working on the ninth floor,” says the adviser to Tunisia’s sustainable growth ministry, pointing at a labourer on the half-constructed tower block opposite. “He harasses me. Every single day I observe him and all the other individuals throw their refuse on to the street below – concrete, litter, every little thing.”
Across Tunisia, with the dust of revolution beginning to settle, refuse looms large in the public conversation. Litter, especially plastic bags, has come to dominate the country’s famously dramatic landscape. The problem is felt by all citizens, but none encounter it more acutely than these living up coming to the straining landfill websites.
Ridha Trabelsi, 45, a shopkeeper who lives in the modest Tunis suburb of el-Attar, is a case in stage. “Would you like to reside here?” he asks, gesturing in direction of close by Jbel Borj Chakir, Tunisia’s biggest landfill web site and a source of expanding exasperation. “They explained they were going to shut it last year, but they haven’t. It’s nevertheless right here and it is only obtaining larger.”
The influence of landfills on this kind of areas is difficult to overstate. In 2011, right after the Jasmine revolution, it was the landfill websites at Djerba, Enkhila (near Nabeul), Oued Laya (close to Sousse), Agareb (near Sfax), and the country’s only hazardous waste-treatment plant, at Jradou, that bore the brunt of local residents’ fury.
All had been closed, most of them temporarily, as a end result of violence. Jradou stays shut, and it is unclear where its waste is being handled. Strategies to reopen the Djerba website have triggered far more violence.
In el-Attar, the stench of rubbish chokes the air it sticks in your throat and permeates your clothing. Trabelsi’s son, eight-year-previous Mohamed, is asthmatic. Respiratory sickness is rife.
“When you build a landfill, you create it for a specific time period,” says Morched Garbouj, an environmental engineer and president of the SOS BIAA environmental group. “Right here at Jbel Borj Chakir, that time period ended in 2013. At that level, it need to both have been closed or, at the least, working at about ten% to 20% capacity.”
According to Darghouth, no determination has been taken on the prolonged-phrase potential of Jbel Borj Chakir. “We’re taking delivery of all around two,000 tonnes of waste each and every day. That has to go someplace … We’re just dealing with almost everything on a day-to-day basis even though we perform to implement a bigger strategy.”
“1 of the issues here is that we don’t know what variety of waste we’re dealing with,” says Garbouj. “Elsewhere, waste is separated, here it all will get dumped collectively – chemical, industrial, family and health-related.” Residents and those who make their living scavenging the dump have reported locating blood bags and foetuses in the refuse at Jbel Borj Chakir, a claim denied by Agence Nationale de Gestion des Déchets, which manages waste on behalf of the environment ministry.
“I did not just see them [the diverse types of waste], I dealt with them,” says Kamel Marouani, a former refuse employee. “Chemical, health care, every thing.”
“One of the troubles with all the various types of waste is the leachate it generates [the liquid created at the base by the compressed refuse],” says Garbouj. “Leachate is extremely toxic, so there are stringent controls about how it should be treated and disposed of. Even so, simply because no 1 understands what’s in it, no one understands how it need to be handled.”
Marouani, who was diagnosed with lung cancer in August 2012, worked at Jbel Borj Chakir for 10 years, the previous 5 for a French company, Pizzorno, a single of 3 contractors that handle landfills for the Tunisian government. One particular of his tasks was to work in the 10 leachate basins that surround Jbel Borj Chakir. He was necessary to wade by way of the often chest-high, reeking, black leachate – constructing dams or clearing away the thick foam that forms on the surface of the basin.
SOS BIAA estimates that the value of transporting and disposing of waste at Jbel Borj Chakir was about $ 110-$ 125 (£65-£75) a ton, in contrast with the equivalent cost in New York of $ 86. This was in spite of drastically reduced overheads. Trucks dumping at Jbel Borj Chakir pay Pizzorno $ 15 for every single ton of waste deposited in return for the firm’s experience in managing the web site. Offered that, on an common day, about three,000 tons of waste is deposited, that equates to a day-to-day income stream of $ 45,000. The costs of trucks and labour are billed to the Tunisian government.
In 2011, Pizzorno was the subject of a complaint by the post-Arab spring government’s Commission of Investigation on Corruption and Embezzlement in excess of its dealings with President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s regime. On 15 March, Pizzorno’s five-yr contract with the Tunisian government expired. No choice has been taken on a achievable successor. Pizzorno, which continues to handle the internet site on a caretaker basis, declined to comment on any of the factors raised in this report.
Desta Mebratu, deputy director of the UN Atmosphere Programme’s regional office for Africa, stated: “Disposal in sanitary landfills is the last alternative that need to be deemed … Tunisia is 1 of the 1st African nations that established a national programme on waste minimisation and cleaner production. This programme has led to reduction of a generation of industrial waste and reduction of pollution.”
In el-Attar, minor of this matters. Kids carry on to perform near the landfill website. According to SOS BIAA tests, the local water provide – like all the water inside a 5km radius – continues to be contaminated by fine particles, nitrates and even hefty metals from the dump. Trabelsi seems at the mountain of refuse that dominates the landscape for miles. “We have sick outdated folks. Our youngsters are sick. We can’t continue.”
Tunisia"s poorest towns left to shoulder burden of hazardous toxic landfill web sites | Simon Speakman Cordall
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