Gota blames Government
Posted on April 18th, 2017
By Shaahidah Riza Courtesy Ceylon Today
Had the incumbent government followed through the plan to create a sanitary landfill, the Meethotamulla tragedy could have been prevented, said former Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa. He added that the 2015 Budget had allocated funds for this plan.
Within the last two years if this plan was implemented, the issue with regard to the Meethotamulla garbage dump would have been solved, he said.
“They didn’t do that. They will have to find another site and dump there. They will create the same situation there as well,” Rajapaksa said.
He added that the government has to find an alternative solution to sort out the accumulated garbage. The quality of Sri Lanka’s garbage is wet, he said and went onto note that therefore discourse pertaining to recycling and power generation are not workable.
Speaking to Ceylon Today, he explained further, “We had a plan which we finalized following a lot of research. It was a World Bank initative. The World Bank assisted us with their funding to get expert advice on this. So we realized that the only solution to the Sri Lankan garbage crisis was sanitary dumping. When we looked at various places, ultimately we realized, that Arawakkalu, a site in the Puttalam District, was ideal to create a sanitary landfill with the appropriate technicality. The plan was to have a transit place in Meethotamulla and take all of this garbage on daily basis via rail wagon to Arawukkalu. This would have been a sanitary dumping process. They talk of Megapolis and so on; I don’t know why this plan was not implemented.”
The plan was neglected due to the change of government, Rajapaksa said and noted that the problems pertaining to Meethotamulla had been ignored for the last two years.
April 19th, 2017 at 4:44 am
Gota made us proud in so many ways. He is a gentleman with a vision not a garbage collector like Champaka. Colombo became the cleanest city in the world when he was there as Secretary. He is a man of action. Pity we lost his services. We need people like him if we want to build a modern lanka not Stooges, fraudsters, brainless idiots like we have in this Yamapalanaya government. Get rid of this evil lot soon to bring back the best of best back in saddle.
April 19th, 2017 at 2:04 pm
Gota had proposed a solution to this problem when the MR/UPFA govt was in power that was discarded and not implemented by the Yamapalanaya despite a near complete breakdown of garbage disposal system that had function efficiently under Gota.
However, even Gota’s solution did not make good use of the garbage, for example for energy production. Gota had said recently that a detailed study commissioned by him had concluded that the ‘Sri Lanka’s garbage content was too “wet” ‘ to be used for energy generation, which I presume would be by burning as fuel to generate steam in a boiler.
I tend to disagree with the “too wet to burn” assessment. The garbage can always be “pre-conditioned” or “sorted and dried” using the effluent hot gases of burning before those gases are vented through a chimmney stack. Furthermore, there are other efficient ways of using that garbage, including microbial digestion to produce combustible gases.
Since the bulk of the waste is organic matter, ordinary composting with air injection can produce both combustible methane gas, and valuable solid compost fertiliser. Organic compost fertiliser could be used to replace expensive inorganic NPK fertilizer to grow fruits znd vegetables. In the USA, the sale and consumption of organically grown foods, at premium prices above food grown using inorganic fertilisers and herbicides, is increasing exponentially. There are methods of using organic compost fertilisers that even eliminate the need for synthetic hrrbicides (such as the notorious Glyphosate, now that has recently been added to the list of CARCINOGENS in California with specified MCLs).
IT IS TIME that composting of garbage and the organic growing of food is adopted as National Policy in Sri Lanka. This can be economically done by individual homeowners as well as public and government institutions.
A well designed and integrated system to transform garbage into useful energy and organic fertilizer, will help us immeasureably to spend less on food, solve the garbage disposal prob