Sulaimani street sweepers overwhelmed by tons of garbage

SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region –This is Sulaimani's main market. Hundreds of street vendors make their living here. After finishing their work, the vendors leave their garbage out to be cleaned by municipal street sweepers.

95 street sweepers clean the market every night from 5 to 11 pm, collecting and cleaning the hundreds of tons of garbage the market  produces every day.

A Sulaimani street sweeper's monthly salary is 300,000 to 400,000 IQD ($250-$330).

Munir Ali, a street sweeper, says that people don’t think about their situation while cleaning the streets. "The amount of garbage is too much. We work from 5:30 am until 11:00 pm,” he told Rudaw.

Another street sweeper complained about the vendors and the shop owners. “Our problem is with those vendors who leave their waste on the streets and the grocers who leave their rotten fruits and vegetables on the streets.”

Faisal Ziyad, a shop owner, agreed with the sweepers' sentiments. He said, "[Vendors] don’t have to put the garbage on the streets. They have to put it into something, a box or a bin. If they leave it on the pavements, it will end up in the streets."

There is too much garbage for the sweepers to cope with every night, even with the occasional help of citizens and shop owners who recognize that the street sweepers are overwhelmed by the amount of garbage left in the market.

Every evening, more than 20 garbage trucks transport the waste from the markets to a town outside Sulaimani called Tanjaro.

Sulaimani produces more than 1,200 tons of garbage every day. The remnants are burnt in Tanjaro, causing air pollution in the city.

To date, no recycling infrastructure has been set up to manage the waste. 

Reporting by Sawen Saeed

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