Our View: Changing minds key to a greener Cyprus

Agriculture Minister Maria Panayiotou has presented a six-point action plan to tackle illegal garbage dumping, noting that the problem is out of control.

The minister is right, of course – but the problem has been out of control for years now, the government’s newfound sensitivity having more to do with the fact that illegal dumping sites are proving to be fire hazards.

Drone footage of the devastating fire in the Polemi area a few weeks ago – which completely destroyed five homes, among other damage – seems to show that the fire started from an illegal landfill.

It’s good news that the government is determined to do something about fly-tipping, and the measures outlined in the plan – an island-wide cleaning campaign, increased site inspections, more green points – sound impressive. But the underlying challenge is a need to change people’s mentality.

Why do Cypriots litter so relentlessly? Some will say it’s a lack of education (or civilisation) and leave it at that – but it’s worth pausing to consider the question, if only because it’s so puzzling.

Garbage dumping is the most insidious eco-crime, and the least explicable. Damaging the ecosystem of endangered wildlife, for instance, is equally harmful, but not everyone can be expected to care about endangered wildlife. Dumping waste in an empty field, on the other hand, isn’t just wrong, it’s ugly – visibly, undeniably so. Why do so many seem indifferent to that?

It’s not because they have no other recourse. There are 22 green points on the island, with three more about to open (the plan provides for eight more on top of that). For most people, a green point is a short drive away, probably shorter than the drive to one of the illegal sites, which tend to be out of the way for obvious reasons.

The system in Cyprus bends over backwards to facilitate the removal of unwanted waste. Green points are free and easy to navigate. Municipalities will also transport household items for a small fee: Strovolos, for instance, charges €10 for up to three ‘bulky items’ (including furniture, carpets, fridges and so on), then €5 per item beyond that.

Part of the problem is simple Nimby-ism. One often notes a bizarre ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mentality, with people dumping waste just outside their property, or burying the day’s detritus before heading home after an excursion.

There may also be a more subconscious driver. Just as Cyprus is a place where corruption is rife, and widely accepted as inevitable, so the visible presence of litter – not just in illegal landfills but more generally, in both city and country – works as a kind of fatalism, a resigned acceptance of lawlessness.

The metaphor may seem strained – but it’s no accident that societies that clamp down on littering (Singapore, most famously) tend to also be ‘clean’ in terms of being honest and law-abiding. Littering and illegal dumping are similar to the broken-windows theory that became popular in New York under mayor Rudi Giuliani – relatively minor crimes that nonetheless reflect a lack of civic pride and a broken society.

That, above all, is the problem here: lack of civic pride. Fly-tipping comes from an atomised, anti-social worldview (as if to say ‘If I can’t see the garbage, it might as well not exist’), and a lack of respect for the land itself.

This is not an isolated problem. Cypriots’ relationship to the land tends to be transactional – as reflected also in the rampant development that’s uglified much of the island. Land is valued in proportion to how much money can be made from it.

There’s no real equivalent to ‘England’s green and pleasant land’, no sentimentality for pastoral beauty. A fly-tipper chided for dumping an old fridge in an empty field would probably respond – quite reasonably, in their view – that no one was using it anyway.

These are all slightly abstract objections to the problem of illegal dumping. It’s actually quite lucky, in a way, that these sites have been shown to cause fires, since it gives the government a solid, technocratically acceptable reason to go after them.

The solution, however, won’t come through six-point action plans and frequent inspections. It’ll come by educating Cypriots from a young age to love their island for its beauty and do their best to keep it beautiful.