AsiaLIFE

“I think in the future waste management and recycling will improve, because people are starting to see that they can make money from it,” says Kora Heng Yon. The director of the Community Sanitation and Recycling Organisation (CSARO) does not beat about the bush when discussing our capital’s current waste management system. He believes it to be inefficient and weakly managed. Walk around the city past the impromptu dumps on every other street corner, or just try taking a breath near the open sewer along Street 105 and you quickly get the picture. With no recycling schemes or waste sorting programmes at hand, who do you turn to with your household waste if you want to be green and clean?

In 1997 Kora with some like-minded Cambodians, founded the non-profit CSARO. Back then they believed it was possible to improve the environment while bettering the living conditions of the urban poor – in particular the thousands of adult and child waste pickers who eke out a living from Phnom Penh’s waste. Locally known as the ‘hychai,’ these are men, women and children, who go around town pulling a cart and scavenging or buying mostly plastic, glass, paper and aluminium waste.

Hychai, Hychai, Hychai!

Through a series of programmes CSARO works with both urban slum populations and the ‘hychai’ people. For the children, CSARO has set up a special mobile outreach programme that includes a library bus, teaching first aid skills and hygiene. “We work with three hundred hychai children and their parents,” he says. The aim of the programme is to bring the children back to school. As for the adults, CSARO teaches them how to increase their income through waste recycling, and how to improve hygiene. The recyclable material that the waste pickers collect is sold to local depots – usually small family owned businesses – where the waste gets prepared for shipping to Thailand and Vietnam.

“It depends on the buyer’s requirements,” Kora explains. “They may want plastic bottles to be grinded or chopped into small pieces. The depots then also get a better price.” Eventually the material gets remade into plastic chairs, tubes, waste bins and so on. “Some people here can recycle tyres, but for recycling into more difficult products, they need special skills and I think we don’t have that here yet,” Kora says.

With the urban slum community CSARO focuses on waste management and sanitation – clean water, toilets, sewers and roads. The people in the community who are interested in recycling are taught how to make products out of waste. The result is a series of funky handicrafts that CSARO sells wholesale to outlets in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. “Mith Samlang [international NGO] sends some of their children to join our training,” says Kora. “We instruct them for about three months and after that they go and spread the word in the community.”

Dirty Business

However, this still leaves us with an enormous amount of organic waste. For that purpose CSARO has started a composting facility near their centre where they successfully produce organic fertiliser, which is sold to farmers from the provinces, to households who use it in their garden and to commercial flower and plant growers. Demand is so big now that it outruns their supply. Currently CSARO and the waste pickers collect organic waste only in zones where CINTRI, the private company doing the waste collection in Phnom Penh, doesn’t provide a service.

“They don’t allow us to collect in other zones,” says Kora. “When an NGO goes to work and sends the community to collect waste, they worry about their business.” However, almost all of the waste that CINTRI collects is just put in trucks and transported to the dump without sorting, according to Kora. “They don’t recycle,” he says. This leaves all kinds of environmental problems such as the release of toxic gases and pollution of ground water, according to him. “We tried to negotiate with them and to explain how their company can benefit but they said there’s no need to cooperate,” Kora claims.

When AsiaLIFE Guide contacted CINTRI they were unavailable to be interviewed. According to their website the company in 2002 signed an exclusivity agreement with the Municipality of Phnom Penh to provide rubbish collection services for a period of forty-nine years. “When negotiating with a private company, the government could include a requirement to build a compost plant,” says Kora. “If that’s not possible, then they should find a partner who can do the job and provide them with a licence.” However, he thinks that the future might see improvements. He believes the market is out there, it’s just that the people need to learn skills to make compost out of organic waste from urban people. “The market exists,” he says.

Towards a Solution

“When waste is collected, you need to think of a transit area,” Kora says. He proposes a processing centre for all the household waste where the waste pickers help separate it, clean the recyclable waste and pack it properly for shipment and sale abroad. It would considerably reduce the waste that ends up on dumps and decrease the burden on the environment. “The waste pickers would be very happy to be part of such a system because waste separation for them means a way to provide income,” he says. “They should be assisted with their hygiene and be provided with protective clothing and masks.”

There’s also work to be done at the consumer end. According to Kora, the government should do a lot of public awareness campaigns and set up a system so that households know where they can put their different kinds of waste – public recycling containers for example. “If you keep the current system, people don’t want to change, or even if they want to change, they can’t, so you have to give them a way to change,” he says.

For more information, visit: www.online.com.kh/users/csaro