Make Singapore a ‘truly clean city’, PM Lee says after seeing Laneway Festival trash
[UPDATE 28 January 2015, 10:13pm: Added response from organisers of St. Jerome's Laneway Festival Singapore]
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong stressed the importance of working together to keep Singapore clean in a Facebook post on Wednesday in which he also showed a photo of trash left behind by Laneway Festival goers.
The St Jerome’s Laneway Festival that took place at The Meadow at Gardens by the Bay last Saturday and featured 19 music acts drew about 13,000 attendees.
“It takes continuous effort to keep Singapore clean. We need to progress from being a cleaned city to a truly clean city," he said.
"All of us can play a part – picking up our own litter, educating our children and grandchildren, and reminding others to do the right thing,” he pointed out.
Lee also reminded readers of the Myanmar fans who were seen picking up litter at the National Stadium, after their national team lost to Singapore at the AFF Suzuki Cup in November last year.
Festival organisers told Yahoo Singapore in a statement that a total of 60 cleaners and 10 supervisors were deployed between 18 and 26 January to perform cleaning duties on festival grounds. They also placed 80 waste bins across the festival venue, each of which were able to hold up to 660 litres of waste. Trash collected from those bins were then transferred to 10 "open top containers".
Organisers are currently in talks with several companies to further improve the waste management situation.
With regards to Lee's Facebook post, they highlighted, "We should not misinterpret the point of the Facebook comment, which is to ask Singaporeans to create the habit of picking up after themselves..."
A Delfina Utomo, 28, who was at the event said, “To be honest, a lot of festivals in Singapore end up like that. It just happens that it's a sold out festival, so with more people, and more stalls and booths, there'll be more trash. That said, it doesn't excuse festival-goers from clearing their own trash.”
“I feel bad for the cleaners because they have to clear up everything. This happens not once but also for the past Laneway Festivals,” said a Nor Asyraf, 26, who thinks that the venue lacked rubbish bins.
A 17-year-old Maryam Lehmann said that the rain had worsened the trash situation, “I think it was especially bad this year because they gave out free ponchos and it rained. So when it stopped raining, people just left their ponchos lying around.”
“I think they should put more obvious bins around,” she added.
