UAE | Environment
Green replaces filth in Bur Dubai locality
Mounting piles of rubbish thrown into the street by first-floor residents of some buildings in Bur Dubai has pushed a ground floor tenant to take matters into his own hands.
- By Emmanuelle Landais, Staff Reporter
- Published: 23:41 October 3, 2008
- Image Credit: Megan Hirons/Gulf News
- To counter the menace, Shah forked out about Dh600 from his own pocket to make the street more appealing by lining the wall with potted plants.
Dubai: Mounting piles of rubbish thrown into the street by first-floor residents of some buildings in Bur Dubai has pushed a ground floor tenant to take matters into his own hands.
Every day, neatly tied up bags of rubbish come sailing down from tenants above to the street below as some people have taken to dumping their waste out of the window.
The result is a filth-strewn alley just a few hundred metres from the newly-revamped Bastakia area, popular with tourists and art aficionados.
Tanvir Shah, 26, an Indian marketing consultant who has lived in the area for six years, galled at the sight of waste continuously piling up outside his home, sometimes even left on his balcony wall.
Complaints to Dubai Municipality by his father a few years before resulted in a board nailed to the wall which says violators will be fined Dh500 for littering - but the littering continues regardless.
To counter the menace, Shah forked out about Dh600 from his own pocket to make the street more appealing by lining the wall with potted plants. The first time the small pots went missing but now, four months on, the plants are seemingly making some impact.
"The area used to be decent but now low-income earners who don't seem to have values or any civic sense, are turning it into a dump," said Shah.
"The first thing to do would be to build a proper pavement here so that people take pride in the area in which they live. At the moment, they don't care so they throw their rubbish anywhere," he said. "The Bastakia area is being revamped and I think this area should be beautified too. We are just 500 metres away."
Shah decided to put some plants to provide a bit of greenery to the area. "I got so fed up with the garbage that I cleaned it up myself," he said.
Dubai Municipality workers come everyday to clean up the area.
"Residents are so lazy they opt for the short cut version instead of taking their waste to the dumpsters," he said.
Shah also tried speaking to tenants in the area about waste disposal methods, "They were shocked at the idea," he said.
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