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Mixing Waste Hazardous to Health – Kaizen Environmental Services
The lack of separation of waste before disposal is hazardous to human health and adds to the already existent chemical pollutants that emanate from manufacturing companies.
This is a fact that many Guyanese are unaware of and is evident in the disposal of mixed waste emptied into the Haags Bosch Landfill Site.
Vishnu Doerga
Country Coordinator of Kaizen Environmental Services (Guyana) Limited, Vishnu Doerga, told Clean and Green Guyana/Guyenterprise, “In Guyana we have a situation where the separation of waste is not being done so you would have organic, inorganic and hazardous and nonhazardous waste being mixed together and what happens when you do mix these types of waste as we do in Guyana, the entire product of that becomes hazardous waste.”
He added that the longer the types of waste remain mixed together, the more difficult they become to treat.
Kaizen will seek to make Guyanese aware about the effects of hazardous waste, as well as provide solutions and remedies in mitigating pollutants.
Persons might question who can be affected by such waste if it is already at the landfill site. For a start, it affects waste pickers who work at the site and residents within proximity of the landfill.
Currently, the Haags Bosch site is filled with medical and other chemical waste that pickers come into contact with. “What happens when we have medical waste mixed in between the general waste is that these people are then put at risk. As they get their hands cut or pricked by a needle…the risk of contamination is therefore extremely high,” Doerga said.
“We would have the effects of items such as batteries and these are not only the automobile batteries but regular household batteries. They all contain heavy metal which does not break down…so you would have nickel and cadmium which should have been recycled…These chemicals leach into the ground.”
This, he said, can eventually leak into water streams that are used for agriculture, aquaculture and even drinking purposes. The effect spells out the height of contamination possible. The stench that emanates from mixed waste substances is also dangerous to health.
“Usually there are very large buffer zones between landfill sites and residential communities…With active landfill sites, the buffers are usually between two and five kilometers for either a human population to live nearby or for agriculture. Unfortunately I think our buffer has now been reduced to less than a kilometer,” Doerga said.
This is where Kaizen Environmental Services comes in. It provides all the analytical services for toxic and nontoxic chemicals.
Kaizen is a Canadian firm with a large operation in Trinidad over the last 20 years. Recently it established services also in Suriname.
It is currently in the process of establishing physical presence in Guyana, as it recognises the need for its services to analyse waste chemicals as well as curb the way in which households and companies in particular dispose of their waste.
It is also expected to create jobs at medium and high scale levels, which Doerga said will ensure that talents and brainpower are preserved in Guyana.
“They test for wet chemicals, they test for toxicity, nearly any material under the sun to be able to indicate what the levels are and if they are within acceptable levels. They also make recommendations”.
“A lot of the pollution that occurs currently in Guyana goes unchecked. If we don’t measure it, in our minds it doesn’t exist”, Doerga noted.
The Kaizen Country Coordinator also stated that the company is currently providing services to a number of local companies but all materials are shipped to its Trinidad and Canada locations to be worked on.
This is because the company is in the process of identifying suitable soil space in Guyana on which to execute its work.
“We need to have an impervious layer below the remediation site because currently there are materials which are being sold as impervious but if we don’t test the chemicals that we place upon these materials, certain chemicals by the reactions they cause, they can damage nearly any type of material that you put there…fortunately in Trinidad we are located on the asphalt lake.”
Kaizen has pledged its support to help create awareness about the dangers of the non-separation of waste in Guyana and to help in mitigating toxic chemicals that currently exist.
The Country Coordinator is also urging organizations and individuals to take a stricter and more health conscious approach when disposing their waste.
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