‘Kingdom fast heading towards a waste crisis’

The Kingdom is fast heading towards a “waste crisis” in coming months if necessary precautions are not taken, a lawmaker has warned. MP Ahmed Al Ansari said that the authorities have not been allocating enough funds to address the emerging “waste crisis”. He said that further allocation of funds is necessary to carry out comprehensive cleaning activities throughout the year, urging the Ministry of Works, Municipalities Affairs and Urban Planning to work with the Ministry of Finance to sort out the budget.

He said that the recently distributed government housing units add complexity to the clean up efforts and therefore would need a higher cleaning budget, something he said, was not considered when the budget for the cleaning programme was set a few years ago.  “When the agreement with the two cleaning companies was inked three years ago, the distribution of government housing units was not considered.

“Thousands of housing units have been distributed over the past few years. For instance, Salman City has been allocated hundreds of housing units. “Other housing projects have thousands of housing units, which have been handed over to citizens. These housing projects are not included in the agreement with the cleaning companies.”  

“The government is implementing its plans to reduce the expenses and hence it wouldn’t be easy to get additional funds approved,” he said. “We must make sure that cleanliness is maintained at all times and we do not want to find ourselves in a situation, where we have a garbage crisis like the one we had a few years ago,” the lawmaker alerted. Meanwhile, it has been announced that the residents of Manama would soon be able to receive garbage bags from vending machines.

The Capital Municipality, in collaboration with the Ministry of Works, Municipal Affairs and Urban Planning, intends to install automated garbage bag vending machines to provide garbage bags for the residents of the governorate. The municipality looks to follow the success of the Southern Governorate that has installed similar systems earlier this year. According to the plans, the machine will store and provide black garbage bags to the residents that need them. Garbage bag vending machines project is named “Sahal” which translates to “Easy” in English.

The vending machines are meant to be user-friendly, only requiring the users ID number and EWA account number to check eligibility of the user to receive the bag. The project was first launched in the Southern Governorate in April. Furthermore, the Ministry of Works, Municipal Affairs and Urban Planning is considering launching the machines in all governorates. The ministry hopes to cover all important locations in Bahrain with such machines.