Clubbing waste, power bills will generate MVR 2.5m revenue: WAMCO

WAMCO expects to generate a monthly revenue of MVR 2.5 million from households alone by linking the garbage collection fee with STELCO’s electricity bills from April, the state-owned company announced Monday.

In the Greater Male Region, many people are not registering for WAMCO's garbage collection services and non-payment of dues has put the company in a financial crisis.

After consulting the company to resolve the issue, the environment ministry decided to include WAMCO's fee in STELCO’s electricity bill. The change can be seen in the electricity bill for April, which is sent in May.

Responding to a question from Atoll Times at a press conference organised by WAMCO, managing director Yusuf Siraj shared an estimate of household income from the inclusion of waste collection fee in STELCO bill.

"Going by the current numbers, we are looking at recovering around MVR 2.5 million as revenue from the household collection in the city on a monthly basis. It is only within the household collection," he said.

While the issue of non-payment of dues for WAMCO's services has become rampant, Siraj said the real problem is that it has not been made mandatory to register for WAMCO services for so long.

"The biggest problem is that there is no compulsion all this time. No matter how much we tell our customers to register, we only have around 24,000 households registered in the city," he said.

"There are more than 50,000 metres registered. So we know that a large part of the population [in the Male area] is unregistered with us."

Among registered customers, Siraj said that around 85% of the people pay their bills as per rules.

Household waste collection services will be charged at MVR 150 per month at the price already charged by WAMCO. Therefore, WAMCO’s estimate of income from households by linking the waste bill with electricity bills is income from about 16,666 households.

The baseline package for commercial collection services is priced at MVR 972 per month. Businesses are allowed to change the package based on the amount generated from the site, while the monthly fee for the cheapest package is MVR 324. 

The baseline package for garbage collection by government agencies and state-owned companies is priced at MVR 4,572 per month. The cheapest package in this part costs MVR 2,286 per month.