Environment
Tarawa Tackles Growing Waste Crisis
ADB-Funded Sanitation Project to Start Construction in May
A deep-water port has just been commissioned at Tarawa. There’s a sense of national pride felt about Kiribati’s eye-catching Parliament house completed just in time for hosting the Pacific Islands Forum summit last October. Japan will soon begin work on a spaceport at Christmas Island.
But is there anything really more vital than the US $12.6 million SAPHE project? The acronym is for the Sanitation, Public Health and Environment scheme designed to avert horrors that threaten to overwhelm the 24-kilometer-long south leg of the atoll of Tarawa, where about 22,000 people live crammed on a series of narrow islets linked by causeways to form Kiribati’s seat of government.
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South Tarawa is well along the way to becoming a Micronesian nightmare, the fragility of its two- to three-meter coral height showing the impact of waste and garbage dumped on it by the far too many people who call it home. It’s not wise to swim in the lagoon at South Tarawa. It’s wise to step carefully along beaches heavily littered with plastic, foam and tin can debris.
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Waste, human and manufactured, have reduced parts of the lagoon to open sewer status. As with other atolls, Tarawa’s over-population means that disposing of waste is a terrible problem. Tarawa’s difficulties are accentuated by exceptional population pressure.
In the 1980s a seawater flushed sewer system was built for parts of Tarawa. But the cost of maintaining it was beyond the government’s pocket. Much of this system is in disrepair and is not or is barely functioning.
With construction due to begin in May, this ambitious project has to be adequate for at least the first half of the 21st century, says project manager Kianteata Teabo. "The biggest concern for our team is the design of a system that will last. It is not for us. It is for our grandchildren."
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By 2010 the system, due to be completed in 2003, should be handling waste needs of an estimated 45,000 people — half Kiribati’s present population. Part of the SAPHE scheme will be the implementation of garbage collection, disposal and shredding services, including the collection of rusting abandoned vehicles and derelict machinery lying as eyesores in coconut groves. But the guts of SAPHE are its sewerage and water supply elements.
At Betio and Bairiki, at the south tip of south Tarawa, heavy population concentration has caused the contamination of natural pockets of water lying just a few meters below the surface. This water is used now only for laundry and washing, Teabo says.
Drinking water comes from lenses at Bonriki and Buota, at the east-end of South Tarawa. Since the existing water lenses are threatened by encroachment by illegal settlers the government is committed to enacting laws to prevent future encroachment and to ban excess use of chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides in such reserves. Sanitation at existing settlements will be improved as another protective measure for the reserves.
The water supply side of SAPHE calls for the rehabilitation and extension of existing water supply systems, improvements to water storage and distribution facilities, the repair of existing distribution main valves and elevated tanks, a leak detection drive and the swabbing of bacteriological film in the main pipe to improve water taste and quality. "The project to be completed by June 2003 will benefit the majority of the population with better quality water and sanitation facilities," Teabo says. "It will especially benefit women and children now exposed to unsafe and irregular supplies."
Water isn’t and won’t be free. A South Tarawa electricity, water and sewerage public utility board with two government, three private sector and one consumer’s representatives will operate on revenue drawn from a basic charge of $A10 per household per month. The Asian Development Bank is lending $US10.24 million for the project with the Kiribati government putting in $US2.56 million.
Will Tarawa have restored much of its once reasonably pristine character by 2010? Teabo admits that there’s a cultural side of the challenge that SAPHE’s engineers can’t beat. "I asked people why they still prefer to go on the beach. They came back with the reason that they’re used to it. They don’t want to use the toilet because they don’t have the proper paper. They experienced blockages from using newspaper.
"Other people say their toilets are not very good. The beach is more convenient for them, which is something I can’t change. We are trying to focus on the impact on the environment and we are trying to make people understand. When they understand the problems people will start to change their ways."
