Dear Editor,
Recent reports of the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development “taking charge” of the clean-up of Georgetown – including launching citywide campaigns and installing garbage bins every 40 feet around Stabroek Market, personally led by Minister Priya Manickchand – might look impressive on camera. But these efforts are, at best, a band-aid on a much deeper, festering problem.
It is frankly disconcerting to see a Cabinet minister, who should be a policymaker and is a lawyer by training, out directing garbage collection and bin placement, a task that in functioning systems is handled by a sanitation department and municipal managers, not central government ministers. The need for ministerial involvement in basic sanitation functions speaks to institutional failure.
What Georgetown – and Guyana as a whole – needs is not more photo-ops with bins, but a serious circular economy policy and implementation plan. The Low Carbon Development Strategy 2030 itself identifies “Preventing and Managing Waste: Creating a Circular Economy” as a key pillar and promises a national strategy, recycling systems, and measures to phase out single-use plastics and other pollutants from 2023 onwards. Yet, on the ground in 2025, what citizens see are ad-hoc clean-ups and scattered bins, not a coherent cradle-to-cradle system for solid waste.
A genuine cradle-to-cradle approach would start with reducing waste at source; enforcing producer responsibility; separating organics, recyclables, and residuals; investing in local recycling and composting; and ensuring that what eventually reaches Haags Bosch is the absolute minimum. It would clarify who is responsible for what – central government, municipality, private sector, and citizens – and back this with regulations, incentives, and reliable data. Without that, these clean-ups are, to borrow from our Eastern Caribbean neighbours, just “spinning top in mud”, and since we have plenty of mud, we could spin there forever.
If the government is serious about both low-carbon development and urban dignity, it should urgently develop, publish and consult on the promised circular economy and solid waste management roadmap, with clear timelines, budgets, and institutional reforms. Ministers should be leading that policy work, not acting as chief garbage supervisors.