A good topic for discussion on a recent Times article: St Julian’s has a serious trash problem. What can be done to solve it?

15 comments

1. The entire island has a serious trash problem. It’s a consequence of massive underinvestment in basic services, and too many people.

   Best you can do is give people a communal space for their trash such as a communal bin, and remove the policy of just dumping your bag outside your door on the pavement

2. Ban plastics, reintroduce glass.

   I lived in Malta pre-EU and everything was in a glass bottle. You even get reimbursed for taking the ’empties’ back to the shop. This meant that there was no rubbish anywhere.

   If they did a reimbursement scheme on plastics, every scavenger would be on the streets cleaning up the rubbish.

3. Stop allowing people to put their trash on the pavement. Other countries either use bins or dumpsters on the street corner. Maybe also reduce the number of cillect days. Trash and recycling only needs to be once per week each.

   The dumbest argument I’ve seen against the bins is, people saying “what about the elderly? How can you expect them to walk to the end of the block?”. So we have to live in trash because old people cannot/don’t want to walk?

4. The real major problem that we have from our home Island overall has to do with our population density. From what I’ve learned in my scholarship (Both primary and secondary schools) is that Malta was supposed to carry up to 400,000 (400K) or so people, and now we have reached about 440,000 (440K+) people and it’s still growing.

   So I’m seeing a much bigger picture for what sort of problem we’re still facing to this day, and probably beyond.
   I could say to ‘just bring more dustmen’, but I feel like anyone can say that.
   I have 2 ideas that could be solved, but not everyone is going to be happy with either of them.

   Plan A.) This Is What I would call the traditional way (in my perspective): We could make littering even stricter, and we’ll also have some more dustmen, sure. But maybe we could also have some more patrol wardens or even some 360-degree cameras that could be across the country; checking to see who littered. If someone is caught; they can get fined.

   This is definitely going to piss people off, but maybe if we use the ‘tough luck / haqq ghek’ strategy, it could work out.

   Plan B.) There was a special Solar-powered Ship that was used for #TeamSeas, to help clean the Ocean some more.
   Maybe we could use some of those in Malta as well, and we could even have a few that can be for the road as well.

   The only major problem with that is that it’s very expensive to make or buy them, to begin with, and we even need some dedicated engineers to program those vehicles; making sure that everything is in the check. On the plus side, however, anyone that wants to be an Engineer now also has a new job to look forward to, if they want to go for it.

   Plan A is more aggressive and probably slower, but it’s a whole lot cheaper.

   Plan B sounds more ‘Utopic’ and a better strategy, but it’s going to cost us a lot of investment.

5. Too many people. It always comes down to this.

   More immigration requires more of everything from healthcare, civil services, housing, education, traffic. Everything. Too many people negatively impacts every aspect of life.

6. In the current situation? You solve it with underground waste containers.

   Cheaper would be to sacrifice parking space for waste containers which shouldn’t be an issue, considering that the only real reason for having a car is that everyone else is having one.

7. Yeah it’s all of Malta. A proper bin system needs to be set up, dumpsters for residential and commercial areas and no more leaving garbage bags in the street, usually from the night before and are sometimes torn apart by cats and rubbish goes all over the street, not to mention the piles of garbage bags in heavily residential areas. Also places heavy in foot traffic like promenades, picnic areas, gardens etc. need proper bins to be set up that are emptied regularly not left full of garbage and are never emptied. If people actually had places where they where they could throw away their waste when outside maybe you’d see less food wrappers, beer cans etc. on the ground everywhere, especially in places like Buskett, Mizieb etc.

8. Bins exist

9. The problem is that St Julians has become trash.

10. It’s a touristic area, you can’t rely on education. The streets need to be cleaned much much more frequently, not only in St. Julians but everywhere. You cannot have tourism areas looking so shoddy.

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    Edit: another thing I noticed is the collection time in st julians…do they really expect tourists at airbnb’s to get out of bed at 7.30am just to put out their trash?

11. Enforcement is the only solution, along with hefty fines or prison time. I don’t mean the bullshit of enforcement this country has. It needs to be like they were on those quarantined or maybe have automated systems monitoring, which can also be used on roads and what have you, reducing the need for human resources…

12. There’s a bunch of litter just everywhere which is horrible but then again there’s a lack of community bins. Wish the government could notice this and do something about it.

13. Enforcement is the only solution, along with hefty fines or prison time. I don’t mean the bullshit of enforcement this country has. It needs to be like they were on those quarantined or maybe have automated systems monitoring, which can also be used on roads and what have you, reducing the need for human resources…

    Edit: The above does not win votes though, so, good luck.

14. *To find out if a country is rich or poor, look at the bins. If there are bins and no rubbish, it’s rich. If there’s rubbish by the bins, it’s neither rich nor poor… it’s touristy. And if there’s rubbish but no bins, then it’s poor.*

    Monsieur Ibrahim and The Flowers of the Qur’an, Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt 2001

15. Fine people for littering