Epiphany at Godini Bus Terminus

The two Miss Earth Zimbabwe finalists, Nothabo and Tracy decided to clean up at Godini and I joined them. At first I was helping them with my eyes and then my busy-body self decided to get in on the action. Started doing these clean-up things like two years ago and I won’t give you the Sunday school answer, they are demoralising. You clean up somewhere and a couple of hours later it looks just as filthy as before. And it feels like we need a long term solution that will alleviate this litter problem. And it came to me, Zimbabweans don’t do anything engela mali phakathi (fak’imali uzobona.) We need incentives to make people want to stop littering. The threats of fines have not helped so let’s try the rewards system and put a price tag on waste management.

And now you wondering how the heck? Bulawayo needs a recycling plant. We went to the landfill along the Victoria Falls road and nearly got arrested. Who knew that our waste is protected like gold? And it is kinda like minerals cause you get it from dirt and then clean it and sell it. So there’s people that spend the day going through that rubbish looking for stuff they can recycle. Imagine if there was a recycling plant that could buy this golden-garbage from these people. People that collect stuff for recycling have to send it to Harare where there are recycling systems in place. There’s money to be made, but we are just waiting for the Chinese to come start up something like that and then we’ll be up in arms about how they are taking over our businesses. Why didn’t you think of it yourself?

We can separate the rubbish into the three different bins at shopping centres and schools to start with and then as time goes on people may start to separate their rubbish at home into cans, glass and paper. The biodegradable waste can then go into gardens as compost. The government has been singing since forever that we should create our own employment and frankly for me this could be quite a big thing. Sure our industries are dormant or whatever but what’s stopping us from providing raw materials to people that are actually thriving in the industrial sector. I haven’t worked out all the kinks yet but I know im onto something, I’m just slick like that. I’m just really tired of attending clean-ups that in my opinion don’t even put a dent in the massive litter problem in Bulawayo.