EnviroPress Reporter

City of Masvingo, which has a very-difficult-to-achieve vision of becoming a smart world class metropolitan by 2030, has embarked on a refuse bin needs assessment targeting the CBD.

The city has an acute bin deficit which is visible in the many heaps of garbage on many corners and along sanitary lanes.

Masvingo Town Clerk Edward Mukaratirwa told EnviroPress that they have since started a needs assessment programme to ascertain the number of bins in the CBD vis-à-vis the number of human traffic.

“Where ever you find high concentration of human traffic, it results in the amount of garbage or littering increases if there is no infrastructure to absorb all the garbage.

“We are in the process of doing a needs assessment to assess how much bins are required in the CBD’s uptown and downtown.

“We hope to complete the process by June so that we address the issue of littering in the city,” said Mukaratirwa.

The culture of placing garbage in the bins is yet to take root in the minds of many Zimbabweans who find satisfaction in polluting their surroundings.

City of Masvingo acknowledges the CBD does not have enough bins to handle garbage from the high human traffic which swarms the provincial capital on daily basis.

“For us to have a smart city we need everyone to come on board. Our people need to change their mind-sets on littering.

“Sometimes you find people throwing garbage on the ground when the bin is a few meters away from them. This is a very worrying mind-set which we believe has to be addressed at community and personal levels,” said Mukaratirwa.

The city’s waste management practices came on the spotlight in April last year when the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Public Accounts queried on whether the city had done a needs assessment to determine the number of bins needed in the CBD. The majority of the existing bins in the CBD have been donated by corporates