Garbage Adds Ugly Colors to Karachi

Karachi, PAKISTAN - Karachi is widely known as a colorful city -- from the clothes people wear, the food they eat, or the highly decorated public buses they travel in – but some of the color comes from garbage strewn along roads, streets, parks and other public places.
 

Pakistan produces 48,000 tons of solid waste every day, most of it dumped in makeshift landfills or burned in incinerators, according to Business Recorder, a financial news site.

It isn’t uncommon to see heaps of cloth strips outside the tailor’s, wasted food outside a restaurant or coffee shop, wrappings and empty boxes lining roads, and plenty of assorted rubbish at the beaches, all despite several clean-up operations to date. Also, “after the completion of construction works, construction materials are left lying there itself,” said Tatheer Fatima, 19, a Bahria University student.
 
People living in flats generally discard their waste by leaving their bins outside their front doors. Each building’s janitor then dumps the garbage in one of the numerous landfill sites in the city.
 
When asked to describe a garbage dump, 7-year-old Fatima Sughra Anis recited a list of contents: dirty polythene bags, fruit and vegetable peels, remains of pillows and mattresses and human excreta. Her 13-year-old sister Muhaddisa Anis added used diapers and the charred remains of a car. “There’s an ugly swarm of flies and mosquitoes around it,” she said.
 
Often, once these landfills are filled to capacity, someone sets fire to the piles of trash. That adds polluting and irritating smoke to the stench and ugly filth. The people who live around the landfills cannot keep their windows open because the smoke and smell are overwhelming.

The burning of waste, however, is not just carried out informally. According to DAWN News, over 600 tons of hospital waste is generated in Karachi daily and, of that, some 130 tons are incinerated.

Most people blame the government for the lack of proper disposal and recycling facilities at the root of the problem. “The government should provide citizens with proper system for disposal of garbage,” said Wajiha Saleem, 13, a seventh grader at Habib Girls School.

Several other students suggested ways the government should take action. Sidra Hussain, 12, said litterers should be punished. Attiya Abbas, 14, said they should pay fines.

“The government should install fixed dustbins,” said Naima Sheriff, another Bahria University student. “So that people don’t take them to their homes.”

Others hold Karachi’s citizens responsible. “People who litter the country hate the country,” said Muneeba Naeem, 14, another seventh grader in the same school. Her classmate, Noor-e-Saba Saleem, added, “They are careless, illiterate and irresponsible.”

But at least one teenager seemed nonplussed about all the criticism. "When I see a dustbin, I throw trash in,” said Fatima Jafri, 18. “Otherwise I don't bother."