Concerns have been raised at the Suva City Council (SCC) by a Bayview Heights community member regarding piles of rubbish left on common driveways in the area and not collected by rubbish collectors.
The matter was raised at an SCC committee meeting this week.
Senior health inspector Wali Atalifo said this was a common issue in all communities across Fiji although what people failed to understand was the free collection of green waste by the council.
“Just for your information, the council has a free collection of green waste and one of the issues we’ve seen is that ratepayers fail to take advantage of this,” Mr Atalifo said.
“Ratepayers have that mentality that if you put rubbish on the street, the council is there to clear the rubbish.
“This is something that our education team is doing, so you’ll notice when complaints come to us, we have the health education team with the litter officers and health inspectors to carry out awareness in the neighbourhood.
“This is so people are aware of the dates for the free collection of garden waste, kitchen waste and other rubbish that aren’t collected by the rubbish collectors.”
Mr Atalifo said people needed to know that compactor trucks would not take cardboard waste because it would damage the compactors.
“We notice that we drop cartons and other types of waste because those can damage the compactors,” he said.
“Rubbish piles on common driveways are a big challenge because right now from development time, whoever the developer was, one area that was not covered was the common driveways.
“The belief is that common driveways belong to basically all the neighbouring houses where the driveway leads to and that a certain portion of the driveway belongs to certain lots.
“We’ve educated people, but we plead with the ratepayers to check our website on the dates of collection because it is not easy to change the mentality of people, especially when discharging waste.”
