KARACHI, Nov 21: A foreign company with expertise in managing and recycling of garbage will soon take control of Karachi’s solid waste management as a last ditch attempt to save the city from becoming a huge garbage dump.

The city district government Karachi (CDGK) is in consultation with the three foreign companies to make a deal with one of them to take full charge of a job which could never be done for decades despite several innovative attempts had been made, insiders told Dawn.

Sources in the CDGK said the issue pertaining to ineffective disposal of the solid waste in Karachi was again highlighted after the incidence of dengue hemorrhagic fever that has killed over 40 people and affected more than 4,000 in the city. The matter had been extensively discussed at a high-level meeting headed by Federal Health Minister Mohammad Nasir Khan a few weeks ago in which the officials agreed that thousands of tons of garbage accumulating in the city was the main culprit of dengue among other viral, infectious and vector-borne diseases.

The CDGK recently introduced public-private partnership at the town level in which over a dozen local companies dealing with solid waste management had been engaged. The problem, however, remained unresolved as it was found difficult to dispose 9,000 tons of garbage daily. At present not more than 30 per cent of the garbage is sent to landfills while the remaining goes unattended or is burnt.

Insiders said the CDGK’s experiment to dispose of garbage by various companies — each of them entrusted to operate exclusively in its town without any coordination with the other — failed to bear fruit as some reports were highlighted in the media showing the dumping of garbage from one town in another. However, City Nazim Syed Mustafa Kamal does not agree that the outsourcing of solid waste management to local firms failed. The nazim said that the CDGK was engaged in consultations with the three international companies and one of which would be selected.

In the present setup, the local operators lift garbage from certain garbage collection points and dump them at the designated landfill site. But, in future the single operator would start it from the very doorstep of a citizen to its disposal to the landfill.

“The international operator will do it all. Their job will begin at the doorsteps of our citizens, then they will transport it to the landfill. Besides its segregation and recycling, its use in generating power will be carried out in different but sequential stages,” said the nazim. The deal will include the shifting of the municipal sanitary staff and resources to the private operator. “We are not going to privatize the solid waste management but it will remain a private-public partnership in which we’ll transfer all our resources and manpower to the private operator,” he said.