21st April, 2018
By Kazeem Ugbodaga
The Lagos State Government has vowed that heaps of refuse on the streets of the state will disappear in the next few days as Visionscape and the government have adopted means to get rid of the filth.
Special Adviser to the Governor on Cleaner Lagos Initiative, CLI, Adebola Shabi disclosed this on Friday at a news conference in Ikeja, Lagos, Southwest Nigeria.
According to him, government had come strategy to ensure that waste were being evacuated from streets and residences.
“We have been engaging different stakeholders, the waste collection operators, the community development committees, the market women, the civil societies, landlords and tenants associations and various NGOs in the state to assess how we have performed in the last one year.
“There are still ongoing discussions with the waste collection operators, the former PSP operators and the state government, in conjunction with Visionscape to have as many Transfer Loading Stations, to ease the disposal of waste in the state.
“Olusosun dumpsite has been shut down by his excellency because of the safety of the people working there and public health. And we have been asking the trucks to be going down to Ewe Elepe and Epe and we are looking at the distance, as most of the waste collectors’ trucks cannot go far distance,” he said
Shabi stated that government had resolved to have more transfer loading stations within the state where the waste collectors would dump their waste while Visionscape would evacuate all the waste from the stations to the Engineered Sanitary Landfill sites in Epe at night on daily basis.
The Special Adviser said that the state generated 20,000 tonnes of waste daily which would be treated and sorted at the transfer loading stations before being taken to the Engineered Sanitary Landfills.
He added that 60 per cent of the segregated waste would end up at the landfills while 40 per cent would be recycled and reused for other purposes.
“In the next few days, all the wastes we have been seeing on our roads will be evacuated. In the next few months, Visionscape will take stock of more trucks to enhance performance in waste collection,” he said.
Shabi said Visionscape had distributed over eight million garbage bags and over 400,000 garbage bins in the last two months.
He stated that what government wanted from people living in Lagos was to generate their waste, bag them and drop them in front of their houses, for effective cleaning and preventive blockage drainages and canals.
According to him, the garbage bags and bins were meant for the waste generated, while appealing to Lagosians to ensure that their waste were being packaged and kept at the front of the houses.