Sky-high heaps of waste sitting on roads, dotting empty plots and clogging drains across Lahore scream out loud that the metropolis is drowning in its own filth. With the Lahore Waste Management Company (LWMC)–supposed to clear garbage every day–struggling to keep up with cleanliness services, as many as 24 depots draw an appalling picture of unending debris and heaps of filth with a seeping stench. The solid waste problem is fast assuming crisis proportions in the provincial capital due to hasty and overambitious designs of LWMC. Following the patriotic whim of “we can clean our city ourselves,” the public organisation spent the last two years shutting doors on the two foreign contractors, it had previously outsourced the waste disposal services to. This is not to put weight behind the exorbitant plan to pay contractors as high as $17 per tonne of the waste collection–they were collecting 5,500 tonnes– and disposal. Still, the roads looked presentable and Lahore seemed liveable! However, nearly one month after taking the reins, all LWMC is offering to the citizens are apologies for the “inconvenience” and empty promises of making Lahore waste-free “soon.” Those in the know of things point to the fundamental absence of plan in the LWMC’s quarters. While patriotism garnered the public body enough support from the Punjab government, lack of planning to transform itself from a monitoring authority to an operational one cannot be swept under the rug. Simply confiscating machinery–at the risk of costly international arbitration– from the contractors could not get the job done if the machines were deficit, to begin with! Previously, the breakdown of waste disposal machines was an oft-recorded complaint. Having served time well beyond the said duration of five years, the decrepit state of machines was never a secret. Towards the end, Turkish contractors Albayrak and Ozpak were even allowed to rent machines to do their job. How on earth, then, the LWMC planned to efficiently maintain Lahore, that too, daily, sans any arms, is still a mystery. Moving on, a garbage collection body needs garbage collectors to collect garbage. No qualms about that! With a vast majority of the LWMC employees working in the houses of political and administrative bigshots (attendance was as low as 30 per cent at one point), and the shortage of funds to hire around 2500 people previously employed, the ongoing exercise can best be described a fire-fighting one. What both Buzdar administration and the civic body have failed to gather is that calling out the previous government won’t do the trick: not anymore. The state needs to realise the urgency of coming up with a systematic exercise that deals with waste collection and disposal. Only if the garbage pandemic is dealt with, can we look at ways to earn significant revenue. Our neighbour has already repurposed 100 tonnes of end-of-life plastics into 40 kilometres of roads between Pune and Bangalore. Similarly in Hong Kong, an innovative waterless system is being designed to spin three tonnes of recycled fibre from roughly the same amount of textile waste daily. Energy generation from waste also holds untapped potential in Pakistan. However, all this and much more can only be realised if a proactive government and a sensitised citizenry join hands to make the city as clean as possible. Until then, Lahore is well on its way on becoming the city of garbage. *