Environmental Management

The idea of getting a master degree in environmental management sounds a great idea if I only have the time. On the latest issue of Forbes magazine there was a list of the world’s dirtiest cities (what a horrible title for a city to have), I happen to visit two of those cities. I can’t blame Forbes on coming up with such a list, it’s about time people around the world care for their communities.

If I were ever to mange one of these dirty cities, I would start a cleaning program that is real simple and easy to implement. Being around these cities, I noticed how easy it’s to design a mechanism to keep these cities relatively clean with efforts from both the government and the people.
I will share with you factors that are making these cities not real clean:
1- No adequate public restrooms
2- Not enough or ,in some instances, no public trash cans or waste dumpsters
3- Freely roaming animals (dogs, cats, cows etc.)

Of course there are many other factors that contribute to the city being not clean, but the above are the most obvious and easy to fix.
How to fix them? Simple

1- Hire a private company whose responsibility is to install clean and easy to set public toilets. The project will pay for itself; charge each person who wants to use the service a small amount of money that is affordable by most of the people in the community. When the project is up and running, charge any person caught using the streets as “toilet”, a hefty fine, it will act as a deterrent. We can think of Singapore in this matter and how it managed to clean itself.
2- Make it mandatory for each house and business to have a trash can, yes believe me, I have been to countries where I was not able to find even a trash can on the whole business strip.
3- Search around and see if you can find companies, organizations, even countries who can make better use of these roaming animals and give them full authority to roam the streets and capture them. I have seen this done in Saudi Arabia. Years back, major cities in Saudi Arabia were full of roaming wild dogs, the local authorities made contact with some Korean firms (in Korea, they eat dogs’ meat), and in no time, all the dogs disappeared from Saudi streets.

These ideas and solutions may sound so simple and even naive, but I have seen it work.
Simple management, that all it takes.