Once again, the City of Paynesville is at risk of being labeled one of Africa’s dirtiest cities due to the collapse of its sole bulldozer responsible for spreading garbage at the Wein Town Landfill.
The landfill, located in Bonard Farm, Telecom Community, was constructed by the Monrovia City Corporation (MCC) through the Emergency Monrovia Urban Sanitation (EMUS) project during former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s administration in 2012.
However, the bulldozer, procured by the World Bank in 2015 for the landfill’s waste leveling and pushing, has been out of commission for over a month. This has made the site inaccessible, causing an overflow of waste in Paynesville for the past three weeks.
The Paynesville City Corporation (PCC) and the MCC use the landfill to dump garbage, but unlike the MCC, the PCC has no solid waste transfer station to store waste in an emergency.
With the bulldozer out of use, low budgetary allocation prevents the PCC from constructing stations like the MCC, and renting heavy-duty equipment is not a long-term solution.
The World Bank funded Cheesemanburg Landfill and Urban Sanitation (CLUS) project seems to favor the MCC over the PCC, with the Project Implementation Unit (PIU) hosted at the MCC.
The PIU, responsible for managing the landfill for both cities, has not received funding from the government for waste collection and landfill management since the beginning of this year, according to Project Implementation Unit Coordinator Atty. Edwin Johnson.
The situation highlights the high costs of cleaning and managing waste collection, with the construction of a single waste transfer station costing around US$500,000. As such, new equipment should be procured and purchased, but until then, the current state of the Wein Town Landfill poses a significant challenge to both cities’ garbage collection.
