The contractual relation between the private sector and the Aleppo City Council has developed in a number of stages.

Stage I

This stage started in 1993. The contract with private contractors was based on the weight of waste. The contractor would transport waste from specific points in the city to the disposal sites using dump tipper-trucks, which were weighed, in the city. It was the contractor's responsibility to provide tipper-trucks and lift-fork tracked vehicles. In the implementation of such contracts, however, the following points were noticed:

• Private contractors, seeking more profits through easily collected extra weight, would load vehicles with building debris hidden under waste.
• Because the disposal site did not have a balance and was not well defined and managed, the situation was difficult to control.
• The state of cleanliness remained bad: containers were irregularly emptied, and there was no improvement in street sweeping or waste collection.

Stage II

Starting in the middle of 1994, this stage saw the adoption of a new contractual relation. Contracts were based on geographically defined city areas. The contractor was required to:

• Provide a specific number of workers to sweep the streets.
• Provide a specific number of three-wheeled cycles with a driver and a worker to collect refuse bags from street sides and near building entrances.
• Provide a lift-fork tracked vehicle and a tipper-truck to transport the refuse collected and dump it in an empty piece of land serving as a random transfer station. From there, waste would be transported to the dumpsite using the lift-fork tracked vehicle and the tipper-truck. The hire of these was specified in the contract according to the Cleanliness Department estimates of the waste quantities collected.
• Empty the waste containers put in the district by the Cleanliness Department, using a compactor owned by the City Council. The contractor would get it on the signing of a delivery record. He would operate and maintain it at his own expense, and return it at the end of the contract period as he had received it. For each compactor, the Council would give him a lump sum.

The contractor's work would be assessed monthly by an acceptance committee composed of staff from the Directorate of Health Affairs together with an inhabitant of the district serviced by the contractor. He would be paid each month according to a scale indicating the level of cleanliness: weak, fair, good.

The Stage II contract was found unsatisfactory in a number of ways:

• The book of terms did not specify how assessment of the cleanliness should be conducted. Since fixing cleanliness levels could be subjective, it was difficult to tell whether the contractor did what he undertook to do. Although a supervision committee was formed in the middle of 1996 to supervise work on a daily basis with a view to improving assessment, the shortcoming continued.
• Certain laws made it unacceptable to give a lump sum to the contractor in lieu of his operating a compactor.
• Serviced areas were numerous and small. This led to many contractors doing work they were not competent to do. The problem persisted, and the acceptance committee was unable to assess the situation.

Stage III

In view of the experience gained from implementing Stage I and II contracts, modifications were introduced at the beginning of 1997. The modifications were as follows:

• Appointing supervisors in the district serviced by the contractor. Their number is determined by the area of the district. These supervisors submit a daily report that includes the following information:
  -the supply by the contractor of the stipulated number of workers and three-wheeled cycles;
  -operation hours of the fork-lift tracked vehicle and;
  -number of tipper-truck trips.
• The report is entered into a computer on a daily basis.
  -Specifying objective criteria for assessing cleanliness levels.
  -Enlarging the district area to be serviced in order to ensure having an efficient contractor.
  -Identifying the contractor's fees for the compactor operation according to the number of containers he empties every day instead of giving him a lump sum.
  -Specifying exactly the containers that need emptying more than once every day and the streets that need servicing twice a day.
• Forming an emergency task force in the Department of Cleanliness. The duty of this task force is to take over any district when there is unsatisfactory work by the contractor, who is penalized by deducting from his claims twice or three times the value of the shoddy work he has done. This is done to force him to do his work well.
• Retaining the participation of citizens in the work of the acceptance committee.

The third-stage contract has enabled the Cleanliness Department to achieve good success in making the best use of the private sector.

The work efficiency of the Cleanliness Department improved after undertaking a state-of the art study that identified the exact district area to be serviced by the contractor; the number of workers and cycles needed; the operation hours of the fork-lift tracked vehicle and the truck; the exact number of containers to be emptied more than once a day as well as the streets which needed cleaning twice a day.

The study together with price analysis constitutes the basis of the dossier referred to above. A number of books of terms and tables of price analysis (1993, 1995, 1996, 1997, and 1998) are in the Appendixes of this report.

5.1 The Extent of Cost Recovery Compared to the Case before PSP

Private sector work in the field of cleanliness is similar to that of the public sector because solid wastes are collected without any sorting and tipped at dumps. At the dump, some scavengers try to search for material which they can sell such as plastic containers, glass, aluminium, etc. Some sorting of waste is done by the private sector workers who help the drivers of three-wheel cycles. This, however, does not have any real value.

It is worth noting that before 1994 there was no tax levied to finance cleanliness or services. Law No. 1 of 1994, however, allows local administration units to levy a cleanliness tax on residential property and a services tax (that includes a cleanliness charge) on commercial enterprises. Citizens saw in the use of the private sector a justification for the levying of the cleanliness charge. But such a charge does not in any way cover the cost of solid waste management in Aleppo.

Changes of Quality and cost of Service as a Result of PSP

It is not possible to compare service quality and service cost before and after the use of the private sector to do cleanliness work. The pre-1994 situation was bad because of many reasons. These included:

• acute manpower shortage;
• lack of professional management of cleanliness; and
• lack of a clear understanding of the meaning of "solid waste."

However, a comparison can be done if one studies the cost of contracting the private sector in 1996 and what would have been the cost if the City Council had serviced the same areas in the same way required from the private sector. For this purpose, use is made of the price analysis tables in the 1996 contracts with the private sector, together with the salaries and the City Council financial costs in the same year. One notes that:

• The cost of a worker employed by the City Council was SP7,500 per month. This included salary, work nature allowance, medical care, taxes, insurance, and a free meal, together with holidays and leaves estimated to be 8 days a month.
• In comparison, the cost of a private sector worker was calculated on the basis of SP6,000 per month without any holiday or weekend.
• In spite of improvements in the City Council vehicle management and maintenance in 1996 as compared with 1994, the cost of running a Mac compacter by the City Council continued to be more than SP110,000 per month. Indeed, the cost of a compactor run directly by the Council would be SP137, 500 per month if one took into consideration the holidays and leaves of drivers and workers. These would make its availability no more than 75%. In comparison, the cost of running it in the 1996 contracts was no more than SP50,000 (less than 40 % of the cost incurred by the City Council)
• The running cost of a 1993 MAN compacter directly run by the Council was about SP60,000 per month, including the driver's salary, allowances, holidays and leaves together with the vehicle's availability. In the contracts with the private sector, the running cost was SP50,000 per month.
• The cost of a three-wheel cycle was about SP14,200 per month when run by the Council and SP13,000 per month when run by the private sector.
• The cost of clearing random waste transfer stations by lift-fork tracked vehicles and tipper-trucks together with the cost of moving waste on the dump site totaled about 20 million Syrian pounds per year. In the contracts for 1996, the cost was no more than 14 million Syrian pounds. (see Appendix 2 2.)

The figures could be looked at in another way. In 1996, the private sector contracts related to solid waste management amounted to 102 million Syrian pounds. Contractual terms and supervision led to the deduction of 18 million Syrian pounds. Thus, the City Council paid only 84 million Syrian pounds in actual fact. If it had decided to do the work, the cost would have been as follows:
The private sector provided the following:

• 500 workers; the cost per year:
  500 x 7,500 x 12 = 45,000,000.
• 35 MACK compactors; the cost per year:
  35 x 137,500 x 12 = 57,750,000.
• 8 MAN compactors; the cost per year:
  8 x 60,000 x 12 = 26,880,000.
• bulldozers, tipper-trucks, and lift-fork tracked vehicles; cost per year: 20,000,000.

Thus, if the Council had done the work in 1996, the total cost would have been SP 155,390,000. What it actually paid to the private sector was SP84,000,000. In other words, the cost was lower by 46%. The lowering of costs resulted from the ability of private contractors in general to make the most of their vehicles, one the one hand, and their ability to use their workers more dynamically than government red tape would allow.

Here is another comparison. The Hanano District cleanliness contract in 1997 was worth SP 430,000 per month. What the contractor got actually was no more than SP 330,000 per month, taking into account the deductions made as a result of good supervision. In 1998, the Council, seeing that the district was easy to service, decided to take it out of the private sector's contracts. This led to an increase in the cost to SP418,500 per month, that is 24% higher than what had been paid to the private sector in 1997. One should note here that the Council did not include in its calculations the cost of operating mechanical sweepers nor did it include administrative costs.

The differences in costs show that, when supervised efficiently by the relevant government body, the use of the private sector in solid waste management resulted in a better financial deal for the Council. It also led to a far better cleanliness service in the City after 1994 than before. A number of indicators support this conclusion:

1. Before the use of the private sector, the average amount of waste transported to the dumpsite was no more than 850 tons per day. When private contractors were employed, this figure rose to no less than 1,200 tons per day. Uncollected and non-transported waste used to accumulate causing spread of insects, disease, contamination, and pollution. It also led to the burning of refuse in the city, by internal combustion or intentionally, thereby adding to the pollution problem. Indeed, the City Council used occasionally to ask other government bodies and companies to send their vehicles to help transport accumulated waste to the dump.
2. In 1994, the average daily telephone calls to the Department of Cleanliness, from people complaining of accumulated waste and full or burning containers, exceeded 25. There was also one daily complaint on radio or in the press. Now, the average has become less than one daily call to the Department, and complaints on radio or in the press have been reduced to once a month.
3. In the meetings of district committees, the City Council, or the Governorate Council, the state of cleanliness used to be the subject of more than 50% of requests and complaints, and half of the time of meetings was spent in discussing them. Now the figure is less than 5%.
4. Early in 1994, emergency meetings chaired by the Governor of Aleppo or the Chairman of the City Council were more than once a week. At present, such meetings are held once every three months on average.
5. Finally, before 1994, Alepenes used to suffer an epidemic of acute diarrhoea in the summer. Since 1994, this epidemic has not occurred. One of the factors leading to control of this epidemic is the improvement in solid waste management due to the use of the private sector.

Reasons behind the Withdrawal of Many Private Sector Companies from Work in SWM

Mention has been made earlier that contracts with the private sector were small and numerous at the beginning. In 1994, there were 20 contracts worth on average no more than 4 million Syrian pounds a year each. This led to many small companies bidding for these contracts, since securities were not high and work could be started with a small capital. The inexperience of these companies led to failure in doing the work satisfactorily. Good supervision and follow-up led to the imposition of penalties on these companies, and the losses they incurred made them withdraw. Another reason behind their withdrawal was the reduction of the number of contracts. Now there are four big contracts worth, on average, about 22 million Syrian pounds per year each. Only financially strong companies with experience in solid waste management have remained.

The Extent of Public Participation in Solid Waste Management

In Aleppo, there is in every district a committee formed by a number of socially active inhabitants who volunteer to serve their community. Each committee holds a monthly meeting to discuss the district's problems and to pass on the inhabitants' requests and complaints to the relevant government body. One of the topics of course is the state of cleanliness and the effect thereupon of the use of the private sector. To encourage participation of the community in solid waste management, the City Council designates one of the members of these district committees to be a member of the acceptance committee for any contract with the private sector. He/she also participates in supervising private sector work. Besides, the Department of Cleanliness, through the Ba'th Party meetings, receives any complaint about cleanliness and explains the reasons of using the private sector in solid waste management to the public.