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A Day in the life of Mandela Dump, Guyana
June 2003

By Denis Chabrol, CERN correspondent, Guyana

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The Mandela Dump in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana is located on the avenue named after former South African president, Nelson Mandela. The dump is Guyana's largest landfill and a daily beehive of activities.

In 1993, still grappling with the reality that a Georgetown incinerator became derelict after more than several decades in use, the Georgetown City Council resorted to dumping waste on the 10-acre plot of land. The landfill site became the final resting place for much of the garbage that Georgetown and other nearby areas generate. Dead animals and medical waste are buried at the site and chemical waste is entombed under the guidance of the environmental protection agency.

Guyana's coastal plain is about eight feet below sea level. However, the Mandela dumpsite is about 20 feet high, the same height of the average building in the country. 300 tons of garbage is tossed out daily by at least 16,000 households and businesses in Georgetown and neighbouring areas.

Rufus Lewis, the head of Solid Waste Management of the Georgetown City Council, says bad planning explains why a mountain of garbage is located in the heart of a heavily populated area.

"Because we started badly," says Lewis, "we settled for Mandela, not because we didn't know better but because we ran out of sites and we didn't have enough money to put in the necessary infrastructure to build and have containment ponds for the treatment of leaching to protect the sub-surface waters."

Some of the problem of heavily populated nearby communities are dust pollution and odour that can lead to lung and other diseases. Lewis says the council is using basic tricks of the landfill trade to reduce the impact.

"We have been emphasizing basic landfill measures," says Lewis. "I don't want to be naïve as to tell you that we have been successful. We have been trying with the basic resources that we have to ensure that some of the irritants like flies are minimized."

While nearby communities are eager for the landfill site to be cut permanently, at least 60 persons scavenge, picking out a living there, earning at least 20 dollars a day. Among them is one who specializes in collecting old wood that is sold to the makers of wood at the nearby cemetery. Most of their pickings end up at card box plants in Guyana and in other countries. The scavengers say they will make more money if they had the resources to buy their own recycling machines.

There are fears that the fate of the scavengers hangs in a balance as there are plans to close the Mandela Dump by June 2004. Lewis says that will not be the case, as waste recycling will be encouraged among residents as long as they meet internationally accepted technical and environmental standards.

"When we remove these people from the landfills, then all of us have to put stronger locks on our doors," says Lewis. "We don't want to promote that. They are human beings and many of them have families." The new dumpsite will be a 300-acre piece of land about eight miles south of Georgetown. And if all goes according to plan, it will be a source of methane gas.

The 6 million dollars project, to be funded by the Inter-America Development Bank, is aimed at doing landfill disposal in an environmentally safe manner, says Lewis.

"I think the society has a lot of resources which need to be regenerated," he says. "I think the society is dumping too much of waste that can be reused and recycled."

This article is based on a transcription of Island Beat Radio.

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