Waste management in the city

Dec 11, 2025 Editorial, News

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(Kaieteur News) – Georgetown has long lived with a reputation it did not want but steadily earned: a capital city drowning in its own waste.

For decades, residents have grown accustomed to overflowing bins, clogged drains, roadside dumps, and the familiar stench that lingers after every missed collection cycle. Garbage in Georgetown is not just a sanitation issue, it is a mirror held up to the country’s governance, its civic culture, and its national priorities.

President Irfaan Ali’s recently unveiled Georgetown City Revival Plan arrives at a moment when the city desperately needs more than another announcement. The plan promises sweeping revitalisation: upgraded drainage, improved waste management, urban beautification, heritage restoration, green spaces, and modernised waterfronts.

It forms part of a national strategy meant to restore Georgetown’s long-faded image as the Caribbean’s “Garden City.” On paper, it is ambitious, detailed, and forward-looking. But as Guyanese know all too well, plans are easy, implementation is the real test.

For years, Guyana’s waste-management system has operated like a patchwork quilt with missing squares. Responsibility for garbage collection is scattered among the city council, private contractors, neighbourhood councils, and central government agencies.

Coordination is weak, trucks are often broken or insufficient, and dumping sites are overwhelmed. Meanwhile, rapid urbanisation and skyrocketing consumption have overwhelmed an already shaky system. The outcome is depressingly familiar: inconsistent collection, rampant illegal dumping, blocked canals, and streets where garbage becomes a fixture rather than an intrusion.

Yet the problem is not only structural, it is cultural. Georgetown has a discipline problem. Bottles tossed casually into trenches, household waste dumped at corners, market refuse left in piles after closing hours, these are everyday scenes, not accidents. The same voices raised in outrage about a dirty city often belong to individuals who treat the environment as someone else’s responsibility. This is a hard truth, but an unavoidable one: no urban revival plan can succeed unless citizens recognise that public spaces are not dumping grounds.

Still, it would be unfair, even dishonest, to pretend that the public alone is responsible. Leadership matters, and for too long the management of Georgetown has been crippled by political turf wars, weak enforcement, and chronic underinvestment. As President Ali bluntly stated, the “mismanagement and inefficiency through which the city is managed can no longer be tolerated.” He is right, but this declaration now places the burden squarely on his government to show that this time will be different.

Billions of dollars have already flowed into drainage upgrades, road works, housing development, and infrastructure. These investments have improved many areas, but Georgetown’s sanitation woes remain stubbornly unchanged. The new plan, developed with support from the King’s Foundation, seeks to push further: restoring historic buildings, modernising the Stabroek waterfront, enhancing green corridors, and upgrading the Lamaha Railway corridor into a cultural showcase. There are proposals for sustainable growth clusters, agro-linked urban zones, heritage protection, a modernised transport system, and significantly better waste-management systems aligned with the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) 2030.

These are promising developments. But none of them will matter if the city’s garbage problem continues to undermine every effort. Beautification without sanitation is cosmetic. Heritage restoration surrounded by heaps of refuse is pointless. And a modern transport system running through a city whose drains are blocked with plastic bottles is an expensive contradiction.

Waste is more than an aesthetic issue. It is an environmental threat, an economic liability, and a public-health hazard. Blocked drains contribute to severe flooding even in mild rainfall; polluted waterways damage fisheries and threaten residents’ health. Investors and tourists may admire Georgetown’s colonial architecture, but overflowing piles of garbage drive them away just as quickly.

To its credit, the City Revival Plan acknowledges this. But acknowledgement is not enough. Georgetown needs predictable collection schedules, modern transfer stations, recycling initiatives, and strict enforcement

not occasionally, not seasonally, but consistently. It needs transparency in contract management, accountability for illegal dumping, and penalties that actually deter rather than decorate the law books.

Most importantly, it requires a cultural shift. No government, no council, no international partner can keep a city clean if the people who live in it refuse to do their part. Cleanliness must become a habit, not a campaign theme.

President Ali says every stakeholder must help “advance the rescue of Georgetown.” He is correct. But the rescue will fail unless waste management becomes the backbone

not the afterthought of the capital’s transformation. The government’s vision for a restored Georgetown is commendable. Now it must prove that this vision can withstand political cycles, bureaucratic inertia, and the familiar Guyanese habit of allowing plans to gather dust.

A clean city is not a luxury. It is a basic prerequisite for development. Georgetown cannot become one of the world’s finest cities until it stops being one of the dirtiest. The revival plan offers an opportunity, but only discipline, coordination, and sustained political will can turn that opportunity into reality.

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• Editorial, Garden City, Georgetown City, revival plan, waste management

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