Waste producers will pay for new garbage plan
George Town dump, a.k.a. Mount Trashmore
(CNS): A draft consultation document has been released to solicit comment and contributions from the public on one of government’s most pressing problems — the future of waste-management. Consultants are recommending an immediate push towards recycling and composting as well as a public awareness campaign to encourage the reduction of waste, as the concept of ‘the waste producer pays’ appears to be at the centre of any future policy for handling the country’s rubbish.
In an update on the work they have done so far, consultants AMEC Foster Wheeler pointed out that the landfill in George Town and those on the Sister Islands are “under considerable strain and cannot deliver against the modern challenge for improved sustainability”. They also warned that all three dumps “pose a potential ongoing threat to the local environment”.
Aiming to end the historic over-reliance on landfills, government plans to introduce a model that aims to reduce, reuse and recycle and then remediate the existing dumps and improve the sustainability of waste management practices. The goal is to create a more “waste conscious population” that is also committed to cutting down on the rubbish they generate.
“We believe that the generators of waste should be responsible and bear their proper share of costs for waste management,” officials said in the draft document.
Over the next month, the public will have an opportunity to provide feedback on the draft National Solid Waste Management Policy for the Cayman Islands (NSWMP). The consultation period opens tomorrow (Tuesday 16 June) and will continue through to 15 July, and officials said the contributions from the community could impact the direction of future waste management options, as the process of developing an integrated solid waste management system for the country continues.
The Health Ministry has worked in tandem with the consultants to produce the draft policy, which is described as outlining the vision, values, directions and objectives, though as yet there are no hard details on how government will tackle the costly and complex change required to end the country’s reliance on dumping.
Government wants to prioritise reduction, reuse, recycling and recovery, with disposal now a last resort. Policy contributors have stressed the importance of personal responsibility in ensuring sustainable waste management, and assert that waste producers should bear the cost of waste management.
Urging members of the public to make their voices heard during the consultation period, Premier Alden McLaughlin, who is also responsible for environment health, said the policy is based in part on the premise that for change to be successful, individuals must take ownership of their role in the waste management process.
“Accordingly, my ministry will be working to broaden the understanding of sustainable waste management issues and practices throughout the entire Cayman Islands community,” McLaughlin said.
Download the National Solid Waste Management Policy for the Cayman Islands and supporting documents
Hard copies of the policy can be viewed at the Government Office Building, Elgin Avenue, George Town and the Department of Environmental Health, 580 North Sound Road, George Town.
Comments on the draft NSWMP and an integrated solid waste management system (ISWMS) can be submitted electronically via e-mail to Sheila.Alvarez@gov.ky or delivered to the same ministry at the Government Administration Building, 133 Elgin Avenue, George Town, or mailed to:
Ministry of Health & Culture
PO Box 111
Grand Cayman KY1-9000
Category: Environmental Health, Health
Cayman Islands Goverment: Sweden wants your trash! Sell it to them!
Selling trash to other Countries for renewable energy, etc is a growing worldwide business.
Click on the link below:
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/10/28/163823839/sweden-wants-your-trash
Just sell it to them, they’ll come and get it, and you won’t have to worry about anything! Why can’t we just do it this way and not be bothered with dump and recycling issues and problems. Just let Sweden take it all and they can go through it to separate it properly the way they want, plastic and all for recycling, etc. Easy & Simple! Problem Solved!
(or is it too easy and simple, so we rather to prefer complicated with no good solution?)
Enough with the trash talking. Move the dump already!
If the landfill problem is solved then another problem will have to be addressed
Perhaps drugs crime gang activity inbreeding teenage pregnancy education corruption etc
The land fill is easy
Classic Cayman politics. Throw money at it without any real solution.
“I get tired of negativity in our country. I get tired of people who only want to know dirt. I get tired of people who don’t believe in themselves.”
Richard Simmons
The only way any payment for garbage collection and remedial work will happen is by adding a tax on those items at point of sale. However before that happens an independent commission needs to look at price fixing and cartel pricing by the supermarket chains, or they pay for this without our prices being increased from their already ridiculous levels
Easier still just add the garbage collection charge to the CUC bill. Pretty much every household has a CUC account and no one messes with CUC when it comes to paying the bill.
The recycle center on dump road is now closed until further notice.
DO NOT BRING YOUR STUFF ANYMORE
We will no longer pay you for your trash or ship it off island.
We are tired of doing the right thing and beating our heads into the wall.
We do not feel like dealing with bad minded people.
And to the police I like how when my warehouse gets robbed you threaten to arrest me and let the criminals walk out with my material….real cute don’t think that I don’t know who has it. They wont be shipping it into the U.S.
Furthermore I am no longer interested in your Dump and any offer I had to help is off the table. Figure it out yourselves
TIM
Thank God. Does this mean we are also spared of any of your future CNS rants?
Nope I am quite JADED
Maybe I will tell you about the BS I have put up with over the last 7 years
if bodden towners/east enders don’t want a waste management facility…..then thye should be charge and extra yearly fee for bring thier waste to gt…….
I don’t know about extra yearly fee but I do not have a problem with paying a garbage fee. I paid garbage fees for years and don’t really understand why the UDP stopped collecting the fees.
Don’t we pay garbage fee’s already?
nope….that would make sense….. welcome to wonderland….
Well all the apartment dwellers still pay, from what I understand
Where I live we pay to the Ministry Of Environment twice a year a garbage fee. The other 15 unit owners also pay this fee on SMB so I do not know how you avoid paying the fee unless you are a renter.
Strata (apartment/condo/business) complexes pay for waste collections – considered commercial waste. Individual households’ garbage fee collection was stopped several years ago.
You mean like charging an ‘extra’ 2% duty on everythign coming in so that ‘teh polluter pays’ when its time for it to be dumped? … Oh, wait, we did that. – Or is someone trying to suggest ‘waste producers will pay more than they are paying now and the money will actually be used for integrated waste management’? Thats two different things, not just because the second one doesn’t make a snappy headline.
If I’m paying for it then I get to choose where my garbage gets dumped. I chose a nice new facility in Bodden Town.
why we cann’t have a dump in every district? Oh wait we are now going to have 19. I want a Post office in my District and a Police and Fire Station along with a Health Clinic. Certainly people of central BT are no more deserving than my District. Campaiging has started.
We have created a culture where we think everything is free. If we are to leave this land in a fit state to inhabit for our grandchildren, some serious action needs to be taken. First, move the dump, second, if people will not pay then levy a waste tax at source e.g. take aways, supermarket take outs etc, do not collect garbage from house where it has not been sorted by the owner, do not permit the importation of plastic bottles and on and on. This report no doubt will sit on the shelves like the many other reports and gather dust until another lot are elected who will then do the same. I have no idea how to fix the problem as I just an ordinary citizen with no waste management experience so why are you asking me for my opinion (AGAIN). Just take the advice of the experts and do something NOW!
Mmmmm….(waste producer pay) translation….let the people pay and pay some more! Better implement some scales on them trucks
this is going to get ugly…mini dumps in every ghetto and semi remote bush now…as for me in my ghetto I am going to burn and burn and burn…I am already suffering from flies and I am not about to live with the rats either!
Recycling entails every household/business separating their garbage and putting it in separate containers .If this policy is adhered to by the public, which is unlikely, government will end up with large separate piles instead of one big pile. However they still have to get rid of the separate piles, THINK TYRES.
The reality is the landfill problem, like the civil service problems (overstaffing, free medical, non contributory pensions), the Health Service debt problem etc. have traditionally been solved by each Government over the last decades, by the never failing solution of “leave it to the next lot”.
I have lost count of the visions, values, objectives, etc, etc, that have spewed forth from our governments over the years, visions that in reality have turned out to be dreams and nothing more.
Sustainable waste management (sounds good, doesn’t it), will not work (a) because it will be far too costly and (b) because the public will not co-operate.Cap the present dump THINK DART, and open a new one in one of our many swamps – it will at least cut down on mosquitoes.
Please read the attached and become educated on what the Dart proposal was and was not going to do for waste management in the Cayman Islands.
Yes, it was going to provide a properly engineered, lined landfill replacing the inadequate and unlined current dump (for Grand Cayman).
The Dart proposal was NOT however, looking at an integrated solid waste management system – no potential recycling, composting or waste to energy programmes. It was simply relocation of landfill (albeit a better landfil).
http://www.gov.ky/pls/portal/docs/PAGE/CIGHOME/FIND/ORGANISATIONS/AZAGENCIES/ENV/PUBLICBILLS/PROPOSED%20WMF%20DRAFT%20ES%20%26%20APPENDICES%20A%20TO%20C%20APRIL%202013.PDF
They really like using/paying consultants to state the blinking obvious.
typical ppm….spending years and $$$$ on things we already knew….
the spineless ppm will do nothing with the dump.
Dat true but neither will they spend our $$$$ gambling in Miami with a government credit card.
I guess that situation gives the PPM a pass on anything they do or don’t due..If always the same point he finger excuse and now that average response is at least they didn’t Gamble and the UDP has been crushed by scandals and conspiracies so that means the PPM can do no wrong..
Well Done Aldenites
No, it just means that when we criticize the PPM it in no way suggests support for Mac if gambling fame.
For at least 30 years my neighbor, a gentleman from East End, has thrown his garbage in the bush part of the land he owns. Occasionally he burns it or at least whatever will burn – with dreadful smoke and smell.(a policeman living near him does much the same thing with his bush trash every week so no point in reporting it). He started that practice because he thought Government had no right to charge him for garbage pick-up-“communism” he called it. OK, he is not the sharpest knife in the drawer but I bet he is not alone: it is the mentality that “Government has money, they don’t need to ask us to pay for things”. Hence, for example, the HSA debt. Good luck with “the waste producer pays”.
The situation you describe is fairly common at least in Grand Cayman, 5:32. The willing or (more often) reluctant acceptance of “things as they are even when they are wrong” (tinted windows and illegible car number plates, feral dogs, drunk driving, roadside littering, asking politicians for hand-outs, not paying bills, not enforcing laws that exist etc) is what Legge was trying to articulate in his infamous editorial but he cocked it up spectacularly by dragging in (purely for effect) “corruption” since the Webb affair was in the news and impugning ( very unfairly) Caymanians and Caymanian society as a whole, allowing the politicians to do what they do best ie rant and rave and make idiots of themselves and, alas, us in the eyes of overseas observers.
It’s only a fee for expats; Caymanians get free. They might get a bill in the mail, but no one will make them pay. You can bet on this.
I trust that the people charged with implementing this new policy will really look at the source of the garbage on the dump and really make the cost fall on the real source of the garbage and not set up the charges so that the majority fall on the individual households just because that is the easiest source to charge.
See all that white stuff in the picture, I drove up to the dump, most of the white garbage is Styrofoam, I hope they charge the real source for the cost and not the end user. Ditto for the mounds of appliances and cars.
Which company here makes the most money from styrofoam and plastic cups, is continuously destroying the mangroves, plans to build a cement top over the too-small island and on it goes….
The draft policy does contain a list of a breakdown by type of waste in the Waste Tonnages section. In the future waste, I understand that further “waste characterisation” work may indeed take place depending what are identified as potential waste management options.
wow….welcome to 20 years ago……
Mt. Trashmore will take decades to fix. So why not fix the easy stuff first?
Try sorting out the landfills and waste systems in Little Cayman and the Brac. How hard could that be?
Surely that is the kind of short term result that should appeal to politicians.
Win win!!
We not using our 120 million dollars on no dump, the money is just not there.
Blah, blah, blah. 30 years or more of outright mismanagement. It doesn’t much matter which party or team is running the show, there is no will to fix this or any of the real problems facing this country.
Government might own the high ground but has also yielded it……
Exactly, 30 years of electing the same bunch of rhetoric filled, feel-good policy making non doers, always benchmarked on their intentions and how much they care about “the people” rather than actual results.
That’s exactly what we have now.
Atleast the UDP tried,but BT said NO.Please just FIX the DUMP