Garbage chokes the city of 4.5 million people. Trash collection is erratic or nonexistent, depending on which part of the city you live in. Insurgents use heaps of garbage to hide roadside bombs. More than 300 garbage collectors have been killed in Baghdad in the past six months, city officials say. Insurgents target them because they work for the government.
"Once we hoped to plant gardens in the medians and on street corners; now we throw our garbage there," said a Sunni woman who lives in the affluent western Jihad district. (The Chronicle agreed not to identify the woman and other Iraqis interviewed for this story because they feared for their safety.)
Garbage clogs sewage pipes, causing raw sewage to overflow into the streets and fill the air with the stench of decay. In the Shiite slums of Sadr City in northeastern Baghdad, residents live in dwellings made of bits of corrugated metal, chunks of concrete and rusted oil canisters. Snowy white egrets skim the surface of putrid, greenish-black pools of sewage in the streets.
More on the terrible living conditions in Iraq can be found here.
11 comments:
Why do you oppose the fee? Do you think it should be free? Is sewer service free? You do have the option of not producing garbage by limiting your consumption/disposal habits, or using your own methods of transporting waste for disposal.
We pay about $17/month for garbage colletion for a family of 4. The service is entirely private enterpise with Onyx and Waste Management as the top dogs around here.
The fee includes a fuel surcharge because of the rising prices of fuel.
Neither Eau Claire nor Chippewa Falls city governments get into competing with private haulers.
Having seen the glamour of the trash business up close and personal, I can certainly see why municipal governments would want out of the garbage business, even att the level of contraction out. In fact, if I were on a council in a city that messed with garbage collection, that is what I would be working toward.
Landfill issues, hazardous waste issues, employee issues - both health (garbage hauling is a physically dangerous business)and "behavioral" (not surprising alot of people do not want to work garbage), vehicle maintenance, weather issues - it's all a headache.
So it seems to me that a private business is going to be best able to reach a reasonable middle point between the costs/stresses of doing business and the maximum fee that consumers will tolerate.
Inserting governmental functionaries adds a middle man and sets up a sense of entitlment IMHO in the consumer. The market can go mental, gas prices go crazy, but if the public sees the service as provided, not by a businessman, but by Big Daddy down at city hall, they will be more resistant to paying a fair market price is how it seems to me.
And, with the garbage service so dependant on fuel I guess I don't see how that won't be passed on to the end user. If YOU don't like the price of gas, imagine how nasty it is for any type of trucking business. Why would a city gov't. want to be in the middle of that?
Oh, and did I mention I've watched the sunrise while standing in the middle of a landfill? (and not a filled over one either - the real deal) Yes, some people have Paris, I'll always have the landfill....
p.s. I see anon posted while I was writing. I did't think people had a lot of options about disposal. My understanding is that it's a very regulated situation, so I don't know about that idea of options.
I meant "contracting out" - still have the typing skills of Hitler, darn it!
Anonymous, the point is we are already paying for it and our taxes are NOT going to come down just because we have to pay a fee for it. What about this do you not get?
I was just trying to point out that people have choices whether or not they use the service or not. They can minimize the waste produced through lifestyle. What absolutely must be discarded, can be alternatively transported, albeit inconveniently, to either an appropriate compost, burn site or, landfill or else form a cooperative to do same.
In other words - if you really want to make a statement - do it yourself.
What do you mean we have a choice whether e use the service or not? The city is not giving people an option to NOT use the service. People are charged the fee regardless of how much, if any, garbage they generate. But tell me, how would someone live and not generate any garbage? That's just not possible.
The town I moved from got the fee in 1985...twenty-one years ago!...and it was graduated down from ten bucks per month to three based on taxes paid on property. The poor and elderly got a break.
The nice thing was that NO ONE whined or gnashed their teeth about it. The city needed the revenue and the citizens understood. In those years that area of the country was in a deep recession.
I think the war has unhinged folks. People in Oshkosh gripe about everything. Tony's post should shame us all. Do you ever wonder what you would do, all you whiners, if something REALLY bad hit us?
Excuse me, I did not realize there is no "opt out" option for not using the service. My bad for not checking out the whole scoop. On the other point, it is VERY possible to live without generating garbage. It takes extremely mindful and conscious living with fewer conveniences. I don't say that I practice it myself, but I have observed it and it can be done. Use your imagination the next time you go to the grocery store about how you could purchse needed items differently without the "throw away components"; could you have brought a reusable container and bought a bulk item of grain or pasta? Could you bake your own bread instead of buying something in plastic wrap? Could you purchase eggs from a local farm instead of in a cardboard container? And then composted discarded shells? You get my drift.
I get your drift, but come on, it's hardly practical. Most of us are too busy earning a living and running our kids everywhere they need to be to bake bread and so forth. And you can only buy so many things in reusable containers before you have to start eitherthrowing them out or paying to rent storage space elsewhere.
Not practical: your word, maybe not convenient as is our American way - but still possible. God forbid you and the kids should bake the bread together instead of shipping them off to yet another scheduled activity.
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