Support urged for waste separation
Published on: Friday, March 24, 2017
Kota Kinabalu: City folk have been urged to provide their fullest support for City Hall's pilot waste separation project.Mayor Datuk Yeo Boon Hai (pic) said this is important to ensure City Hall can achieve its mission of turning Kota Kinabalu into a clean, green and liveable city."City Hall has initiated this pilot project since January 2016 for a period of three years," he said during the launching of the project at Alam Damai Condominium, here, Wednesday night. His speech was read by City Hall Director-General Datuk Joannes Solidau.
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In the project, City Hall will be working together with the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (Jica) and the Conference of Earth Environment (CEEA) of Akita city. "The cooperation aims to improve the quality of domestic solid waste management in the city."Apart from that, this cooperation will also produce a guideline on domestic waste separation and collection."The main targets for the project are houses in residential areas within the city."The residential areas selected for the pilot project are Alam Damai Condominium, Taman Jindo and Taman Green View where the selection was made based on the household income of each area.
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"Among the activities that will be conducted during the project are solid waste segregation, workshops on waste separation methods as well as surveys to gather the feedback from residents," he said.CEEA Director-General Mariko Fukuoka said, on waste issues, Kota Kinabalu faces the same situation as many cities and it must be tackled, especially with the increasing amount of waste and the deficiency of final disposal sites.
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According to her, there are two main decisive factors to ensure that Kota Kinabalu can achieve a zero-waste city status."Primarily, we have to change each resident's attitude towards waste issues and once we achieve that, then we can build an overall city consensus," she said.In the past, she said, Japan experienced a big change through pollution, diseases and waste problems, so the citizens had no choice but to deal with waste and environmental issues."Our first goal for the pilot project in Kota Kinabalu is to start with domestic garbage separation for solving waste issues…however, it will not be easy."I assume that there will be incredible difficulties that we must overcome."Stay up-to-date by following Daily Express’s Telegram channel.
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