Finally, on the surface at least, sensible new policies:
People who waste more will have to pay more and every household will have to start separating recyclable items from other waste.
These are two of the implications of the Solid Waste Management and Public Clean-Up Bill, which the Housing and Local Government Ministry expects to table in parliament in two weeks. [Start sorting out and recycling your waste. NST. June 17 2007]
To be honest, I have not read the bills. The website of the Parliament is not so helpful and its search function is not working at all. Therefore, I am quite unclear what the bills are specifically seeking for other than the establishment of a government-owned centralized waste management entity. It is hard to form some sort of opinion without proper information.
I am unsure how the service providers are going to enforce that pay-as-you-go system. Under that model, the providers would need to identify which trash belongs to whom. It is easy imagine that waste owners would try to dump their waste at public space and then disown the trash to escape the need to pay for trash collection altogether. The property rights of the waste must be properly enforced to ensure the success of the model.
Another matter concerns recycling. The bill wants to make recycling mandatory but I prefer to provide consumers with incentive to recycling rather than coercing them. A good system would reward those that separate their trash by charging them less. In other word, offer them discount and this discount should include the cost of waste separation.
Those that failed to do the same should pay a premium. This premium would include the cost of separating the trash and some sort of penalty.
I wonder though if a waste management service provider has the economies of scale and the technology to separate trash at least as good as that being done by the consumers. If it does, perhaps it makes sense to do the separation on the other side of the equation rather than on the consumer side.
Apart from the payment schedule and recycling, another issue is this:
Along with the bills, the interim agreements between concessionaires of solid waste management facilities, which were arranged under the national privatisation of solid waste management programme, would be turned into concession agreements.
However, once this was done, the concessionaires would be subjected to strict key performance index and have to meet standards set by the government. [Better solid waste services once bills passed. NST. June 13 2007]
I am surprised that these waste management service providers are operating without any proper contract!
The introduction of contractual relationships would indeed improve the situation for all of us because with contracts, the service rendered by these management firms could be used to assure fund providers of repayment for any borrowing made by the firms to strengthen their business.
