Friday Musings
THERE’S money in dog poo and the Mayor and his band in the Georgetown City Hall who say they are constantly strapped for cash to properly run business in this capital city can take heed.

Garbage recently began piling up again in the city because City Hall said it did not have money to pay its garbage collecting contractors and the government had to intervene to ease the mounting stench.

City Hall’s garbage collection headaches may soon be over, however, if the Mayor and his band latch on to a trick from colleagues in a city in central Taiwan where they are paying money for dog dung.

City officials in Taichung in Taiwan are offering shopping vouchers to volunteer dog waste collectors in a bid to clean up a perennial problem caused by the large number of stray animals island-wide.

The officials said the Taichung environmental protection bureau would give vouchers worth 100 Taiwan dollars (US$3) for every kilo of dog poo collected. In areas of the city especially affected, the reward will be for every half-kilo.

“By means of offering rewards, the bureau hopes to goad the public into spontaneous clean-up efforts that protect the environment,” the city council said on its website.

The reward programme should also raise public awareness of the main cause of the problem — people who no longer want their pet dogs and who release them onto the streets, said Wang Wen-ge, a project manager with the bureau.

The initiative will start next week and vouchers can be redeemed from a local chain store.

According to Reuters news agency, stray dogs may be a common sight in poor, less developed countries, but affluent Taiwan’s cities are also full of them, with official figures showing there are about 180,000 living on the island of 23 million people.

The problem began in the 1980s, when Taiwan saw a boom in pet dogs following economic success, but now residents complain about the canine menace and the government has been fighting the issue for years.

The number of strays has also risen further in the current economic downturn as more pet owners dump animals they can no longer afford to keep.

The indiscriminate dumping of garbage remains a major problem in Georgetown and a cousin of mine who lives in Florida and was here on a recent visit felt it is a big eyesore amid all the vast improvements he has seen here.

He feels a small returnable fee on stuff like plastic bottles and other containers can be an incentive for some people to collect and return instead of dumping, and this may ease the garbage problems, which as the 2005-2006 floods showed, can have horrendous consequences.

If City Hall can emulate that Taiwan city and entice shopping and other business firms to offer vouchers for volunteer garbage collectors in and around Georgetown, it may just make a huge difference.

They may not have to go around scooping up the stuff, but can concentrate on other garbage – if you see what I mean.
Looked at in that light, even dog dung has its attractions, huh?