Warning issued to trash menaces

“We will find you and you will be prosecuted”.

This stark warning comes from the Corporation of St George’s after 39 bags of trash were dumped next to a memorial monument.

Illegal tipping plagues the parish and town leaders have vowed to do everything in their powers to bring culprits to book.

This week, Alderman Steve Hollis called in the Government’s waste enforcement officer, Vanese Flood Gordon, and Keep Bermuda Beautiful’s executive director, Anne Hyde, in a bid to trace the source.

Mr Hollis, who is chairman of the sanitation committee, told the Bermuda Sun: “It’s disturbing and disgusting that anyone could do this. We spent two hours going through the waste on Wednesday looking for clues of where it originated and now have a pretty good idea.

“We hope that we’ll be able to now prosecute those responsible. It is time to put our foot down — we have to send a message out that it is not acceptable and will be dealt with whether it is by a trucker being stripped of his licence or those responsible being hit with a significant fine.”

Corporation staff spent several hours cleaning up the dumped household trash on Barry Road in St George’s on Wednesday afternoon. The dumped items included clothing, shoes and paint tins — much of which had been thrown down a steep cliff.

Anne Hyde, Executive Director of Keep Bermuda Beautiful, told us: “This kind of thoughtless dumping is very costly to clean up and requires labour, trucking and sometimes machinery to clean up.

“The end result is a much higher cost than the culprit who was trying to avoid a $25 tipping fee. If you miss your trash day pick up, it is wrong to dump your bag of trash in the woods.

“If someone clears out their unwanted items from their home or place of business and throws it off a cliff, it is wrong. Keep Bermuda Beautiful would like to see the unfortunate practice of dumping stop.

“It is illegal and the culprits should be held accountable and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”