City to be cleaner after installation of waste recovery facilities

Dumping of garbage in the open will be a thing of the past after the Nairobi Metropolitan Services completes the establishment of material recovery facilities in all the 17 subcounties.

And it's all about making Nairobi a clean city, NMS director general Mohamed Badi said at Mihang'o last weekend.

Badi said the material recovery facilities will also be employment generators for the youth.

“The facilities will be a reliable source of income from recyclable materials. This will boost our recycling market and in the long-run ensure our environment and mainly our river ecosystem is clean and safe," he said.

A materials recovery facility is a key component of residential and commercial single-stream recycling programme. It receives commingled materials and uses a combination of equipment and manual labour to separate the materials for recycling.  

The NMS will also install a sanitary landfill in Ruai to ease congestion at the already filled up Dandora dumpsite which holds about 1.8 million tonnes of solid waste against a 500,000-tonne capacity.

“There are also long-term plans to set up a waste-to-energy plant at Dandora. It will be spearheaded by the Ministry of Energy through KenGen. This plant will also considerably reduce the amount of waste at the dumpsite,”the NMS boss said.

The NMS, which has been in office since March, is determined to make Nairobi a garbage-free city.

But it faces challenges like lack of suitable land to set up waste management infrastructure.

Another of its challenges is poor public attitude towards waste management. This has been blamed for the dumping in undesignated places.

Badi said the NMS has bought road sweepers to clean the city, more so the Central Business District.

It has rehabilitated 21 garbage collection trucks, which had been grounded for several years.

This followed President Uhuru Kenyatta's order last March to have the grounded garbage collection trucks repaired. By then, only 10 out of 60 trucks were functional.

“We also have contracted a service provider to ensure cleanliness in CBD is maintained. The reactivated garbage trucks will be distributed to the sub-counties to ensure that the Kazi Mtaani is well facilitated and our road reserves are waste-free,” the NMS director-general said.

The National Youth Service has since March been involved in the collection of garbage in the city. More than 70 per cent of garbage backlog has been cleared.

On average, 2,500 tonnes of garbage is collected daily compared to 1,000 tonnes previously.

The NMS Environment Directorate targets to dispose of 3,000 tonnes of garbage daily at the Dandora dumpsite.

“The National Youth Service has played a critical role in this endeavour and the city is slowly regaining its glory as garbage heaps are diminishing every day,” Badi said.

In its first 100 days, the NMS closed 82 illegal dumpsites in a crackdown garbage collection cartels.

President Kenyatta had ordered the crack down on illegal dumpsites.

The Badi team had in the first 100 days identified and mapped 110 illegal dumping sites.

The NMS has at the same time designated 35 new solid waste collection points across the city.

- mwaniki fm