The National Environment Agency (NEA) will increase refuse collection fees for landed homes to $32.07 per month and for apartments to $9.63 per month from Jan 1 next year.

For condominium units and Housing Board flats, refuse is thrown into chutes, then transferred to bin centres by town council cleaners or in-house condo cleaners. NEA trucks need to collect the refuse from just these centralised bin centres.

For landed homes, the trucks need to ply the streets with the refuse collectors walking behind the truck and emptying the bins placed outside each individual home. This is time-consuming and laborious.

A typical bin centre in an HDB estate serves hundreds of homes. I cannot imagine the time and effort required for refuse collectors to collect the equivalent amount of refuse from landed houses.

That landed home refuse collection fees are less than four times the fees for apartments is puzzling.

Are high-rise apartment residents subsidising the refuse collection fees of their landed counterparts?

Lim Ai Tiong