After living in Ikageng for over a decade, Musa Mogapi says he is disappointed to see that his community has come to a place that has an illegal dumping site on every corner.
“Everywhere you look, there is an illegal dumping site,” Musa lamented. “Where is our love for the environment and our community as a whole? We need to get together and prevent this issue from getting any bigger,” he said.
Musa admits that the municipality has been putting in an effort to clear up the community however residents are not maintaining it.
“It isn’t just the duty of the municipality to clean the streets but ours too.”
“ We have spent years asking the municipality to do something about the dumping sites and all we received was constant failure to adequately and equitably respond to the illegal dumping sites and when they finally do, this is how we thank them?
Musa added that the issue is especially frustrating to him because people do not know the environmental impact and the health hazards that are caused by dumping sites.
“Illegal dump sites do not only attract rats, mosquitoes and other species that pose health risks, but they can also become deadly,” he said.
According to the Acting municipal manager of communication, Jeanette Tshite, there are teams assigned from time to time with regard to clearing illegal dumping sites. A number of areas around Ikageng are cleared but unfortunately, the speed for accumulation of waste thereafter becomes way faster than our capacity to manage them,” She said.
“The bulk of waste that was found at illegal spots were the household types that should be collected by municipal waste removal trucks during their routine of waste collection. It is very sad that some of our residents always find it convenient to use the pavements or open spaces to dump waste instead of using available municipal services of waste collection,” she added. Tshite further indicated that the municipality is currently looking at sustainable mechanism solutions such as by-laws enforcement to address the major part of this challenge. “I hope to one day see every illegal dumping site in Ikageng turn into a food garden,” he concluded.
