It’s midsummer and mid-afternoon in one of Malta’s most popular tourist resorts. And it stinks.
The piles of rubbish attract cockroaches and the smell is disgusting
Outside the busy hotels, bustling bars and plush high-rise apartments on the Strand in Sliema, piles of rubbish mount up.
Only the swarms of flies seem happy about the overflowing bags of rotten food and empty beer bottles; the swarms of tourists screw their faces as wafts of unpleasant smells assault their nostrils.
“Malta’s lovely, but they need to do something about the rubbish. Sliema smells like the back of a bin lorry,” Karen Hammond, a tourist from England, said.
The Sunday Times visited Sliema at 4 p.m. on Friday to investigate the local council’s complaint about “rampant abuse” by residents taking out their rubbish at the wrong times.
The collection of domestic mixed waste in Sliema starts at 9 a.m. every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday while recycled waste is collected on Tuesdays and Fridays from 1 p.m.
Despite there being no collection of mixed waste scheduled on the day this newspaper visited Sliema, countless dark rubbish bags containing non-recyclable waste littered the streets outside many buildings along the Strand from Manoel Island to the corner of Tower Road.
Many of the bags were open and their contents spilled onto the pavement, attracting flies and wasps.
Cigarette butts and empty beer cans and bottles had been casually tossed in the gutter or placed on the doorsteps of expensive apartment buildings or in plant pots outside international franchise stores.
In St Anne Square, renovated just a few years ago, tourists and locals batted away flies attracted by eight rubbish bags that had been dumped next to an empty bin.
Tower Road mirrored the Strand, with piles of non-recyclable waste seen outside many apartment blocks.
An empty bin liner attached to an ornamental tree outside The Preluna Hotel flapped in the warm breeze, as large blocks of polystyrene were blown across the road.
Passers-by had added their empty bottles and crisp packets to a pile of construction waste that had been left outside a restaurant, around the corner from another mountain of bin bags.
Sliema council told The Sunday Times the offenders were both Maltese and foreign, “but the influx of foreigners during the summer months escalates this problem”.
The council intends to switch the rubbish collection time to 7 p.m. for a trial period.
“The aim is to eliminate the habit of placing garbage bags outside the night before collection,” the council said.
It also plans to introduce a door-to-door collection of glass every Monday and it is paying for an extra round of green wardens on a weekly basis.
Vincent Laven, a George Borg Olivier Street resident, said residents in his apartment block took out their rubbish at all times of the day.
“The piles of rubbish attract cockroaches and the smell is disgusting,” he said, though he added that residents received a letter from the council a week ago saying they would be stricter with enforcement and the situation has improved slightly.
Sliema council is encouraging residents to take part in its street cleaning campaign, ‘Let’s be smart…Tas-Sliema bla skart’, with the next event planned for Thursday.