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During the past fifteen years while living in the vicinity of the Link Road Garden Refuse Site I have up until 10 December 2016 seldom made use of the Link Road Garden Refuse Site. Previously I endeavoured within reason to turn as much of the organic waste that originated on our property into compost. To this end I employed compost heaps. The small stuff such as weeds and leaves went straight onto the heaps. The larger stuff was passed through a chipper chopper before also adding it to the heaps. I know this happened because I did it.
As luck would have it my lower back which has been troubling me for some time now basically forced me to employ a gardener. I also sold the chipper chopper and and had to start making use of the Link Road Garden Refuse Site. Generally I reduce the larger stuff in order to maximise the amount I can load into the back of my Toyota Verso before carting it off to the Link Road Garden Refuse Site. My first such trip was on 10 December 2016 and I was completely taken aback by the state of the dump. In fact I had not seen it looking like that since the Great garbage Collection strike that took place in 2011 or thereabouts.
As I regularly photograph what I consider to be dysfunctional aspects of our wonderful city when I cycle about it on training rides, I thought I should record the situation I found at the Link Road Garden Refuse Site right there and then. You can view the video using the link provided below. Suffice it to say that I did nothing with the video until I was prompted to think about doing so when I visited to the Link Road Garden Refuse Site again a couple of weeks ago. The site had deteriorated radically, so much so that I struggled to drive my Verso around the track I had walked some five months earlier to shoot the video.
When I got home I immediately penned a letter to the Witness regarding the state of the Link Road Garden Refuse Site. The Witness did not print my letter. Instead they showed some initiative and class, and investigated the state of garden refuse sites in Pietermaritzburg and published an article highlighting the situation. In one respect that was a pity as in my letter I had challenged the Mayor to try and drive his new official vehicle around the dump site.
As You will notice from my blog banner, I am a great fan of my country and desperately want it to succeed. So I like to think that it follows that I am not a prophet of doom, and that I give credit where credit is due. (My blog on Non Such Road may serve as an example.) So I am always hoping that when I am critical, it is constructive in the sense that it will result in improvements, and as action talks loudest, perhaps I should also be doing more. Perhaps that is why I am writing this blog in defense of the majority of the users of the Link Road Garden Refuse Site. I am doing so because I think it is unreasonable to make the effort to dump garden refuse where it is expected to be dumped and to find the gate to the site closed. Also because at the Ward 25 councillor's recent report back meeting, she mentioned that residents abuse the site by dumping washing machines and fridges at the site. That may well be true, because that would not be the only place where Pietermaritzburg residents dump washing machines and fridges. As everyone knows, stuff is being dumped all over the place. This problem is of course not a refuse dump problem, but a policing, apprehension and prosecution problem.
So regarding the Link Road Garden Refuse Site, I invite readers to view the video and if you spot either a washing machine or a fridge, I would like to be the first to know. The completely unacceptable state of the Link Road Garden Refuse Site is not a problem created by the residents of Ward 25. It is also not the fault of the Ward 25 Councillor who is trying to deal with service delivery issues on a broad front. The state of the Link Road Garden Refuse Site is solely due to the unacceptable level of service provided by the Msunduzi Municipality.
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