130,000 tons went into landfill last year, sparking new calls for recycling investment
By James Whittaker
In a dusty yard in George Town’s Industrial Park, Jason Brown runs a calloused hand through a canvas bag of shredded aluminium cans.
Copper wire, sheets of metal roofing and the distinctive steel planking of old hurricane shutters are stacked and baled in orderly piles.
Fed by contractors – plumbers, electricians and construction firms incentivised to divert their waste from landfill – Island Waste Carriers sorts and ships it out to a large recycling firm in the southeast United States.
It is merged and mixed with a mass of other recyclables from across the US and is processed to become raw product. Some of it may return eventually to Cayman – a 345 can reincarnated as Pepsi or the raw metal of hurricane shutters reinvented as sheet metal roofing.
Visible on the Cayman skyline, as the trucks come in and out of the yard, is the scruffy peak of Mount Trashmore.
The Compass reported earlier this month that an additional 130,000 US tons of waste went into the George Town landfill last year alone. Within a decade, there will be nowhere left for the trash to go.
Without businesses like Island Waste Carriers and sister company Island Recycling, the problem would be even worse. But their impact is a marginal gain in the context of Cayman’s waste-management challenge.
“We are moving the needle just a little bit with what we can sustainably do,” Brown said.
“There is so much more that we could be doing and I think it is the right infrastructure that gets us to that place.”
IWC is a private company, so the materials it recycles are limited to what it can extract some value from to cover its staffing and shipping expenses and make what profit it can.
“We are in business to make a dime,” acknowledged Brown, who started the operation at age 25 with one truck and a dumpster rental service.
The idea of turning trash to treasure – repurposing and reusing some of what goes into landfill – is a beguiling one.
But Brown cautions that Cayman has challenges that don’t exist in other jurisdictions. And the cost of extracting that value – from sorting and processing to shipping and trucking –can often outweigh the possible gains.
In his view, a national strategy is needed to support the diversion of more materials from landfill. But none of that can be effective without the infrastructure to support it and the investment to fund it.
Infrastructure is key
Continuing with the status quo is not a viable option, Brown says.
His eyes bulge at the statistics.
“130,000 tons. It’s a staggering number and I think it shows a lot about our growth over the time,” he said.
“And I just really think that the number-one way to combat that is with infrastructure. You need some sort of proper infrastructure to be able to sustainably manage that volume of waste.”
In the UK, as the Compass has reported, local authorities have used smart policy to help divert tons of waste out of landfill. The leading local councils have been credited with cutting waste by more than 60%, in part by reducing trash collections and replacing them with compost and recyclable collections.
Brown likes the idea but warns that it can’t work if there are no facilities to take the different materials to.
“We can put all the most beautiful, colour-coded bins that we can out there, and we can mandate and enforce things, but if we don’t have proper infrastructure that supports that, then we won’t be able to undertake the task of effectively managing our waste.”
Mainland countries like the UK and many European states have advanced national infrastructure developed over decades. It’s cheap and easy to truck recyclables to regional centres.
For Cayman, the same economies of scale don’t exist. Much of what is recycled currently has to be shipped off island. So something like waste-to-energy made sense to Brown as a means of disposing of trash on site.
“If you choose to recycle everything, it has to go through a process. It has to be shipped overseas. So what’s the carbon footprint of that?” Brown pondered.
“It has to go through all these various stages of sorting and processing, so I just think that again, it all leads back to the right infrastructure.”
Both policy and infrastructure for waste management are once again up for debate since the collapse of the ReGen negotiations. With an election on the horizon, it will be up to the next government to come up with a new plan. Department of Environmental Health officials confirmed to the Compass that a new business case and bid process would likely be needed.
For Brown, any plan must include recycling and reducing the amount of trash going into landfill primarily through addressing the lack of infrastructure on this side. But it also should take into account Cayman’s unique challenges as a small island.
“I guess the big question mark is: What is the right infrastructure that is sustainable and affordable?”
