Month: September 2015

Mine (Hazardous) Waste Disposal – Francistown Landfill

There’s a story in today’s Mmegi (online, at least – I haven’t seen a paper edition) about discussions between the Botswana Chamber of Mines (a NGO representing various mining operations in the country) and City of Francistown Council about the possibility of disposing of chemical waste at Francistown landfill (aka Dumela Landfill as it is at the Dumela industrial area).

Chamber of Mines to utilise F/town landfill

FRANCISTOWN:Botswana Chamber of Mines (BCM) has indicated that plans are underway to use the Francistown City Council (FCC) Dumela landfill to dispose of chemicals used by its members.

Original article

The motivation for this is that the mines generate a variety of hazardous waste that is difficult to dispose of as there are few properly constructed landfill sites in Botswana.

From what I know Francistown landfill site is properly constructed: it has stormwater containment ponds, impermeable linings under the waste cells, incineration facilities and so on.

The concern is how well it is being managed.

Abandoned equipment at Francistown Landfill. Credit: Mmegi / Keoagile Bonang
Abandoned equipment at Francistown Landfill. Credit: Mmegi / Keoagile Bonang

Continue reading “Mine (Hazardous) Waste Disposal – Francistown Landfill”

A Curious Tale Of An Under-Performing Internet Connection

One of the things you get used to around these parts is waiting for pages to load, so having been spoiled by an ADSL line almost to myself for a year the adjustment to sharing a line with other people felt like running in sand.

One of the things my new boss pushed in my direction was to see whether we should upgrade the office broadband. In 2014 they had requested to our ISP (Bytes Technology Group) to upgrade them from 1.024Mb/s to 2.048Mb/s (I can hear many of my overseas readers chortling at this), but nobody really noticed a change and page loading was still sluggish at best.

Speedtest: Bytes Tech Group / BTC in Gaborone
Speedtest: Bytes Technology Group / BTC to a server in Gaborone – paying for 2.048Mb/s.

The shock came when I logged on to the modem-router and found that it was reporting our line speed as 1.024Mb/s… a year after the upgrade was requested and billing increased accordingly. Continue reading “A Curious Tale Of An Under-Performing Internet Connection”