Plastic-bottle police will curb Riverton fires

By Peter Espeut

There is big money to be made out of the business of solid waste, and politics follows the big money. Political activists of impeccable pedigree must be put in charge of this cash cow for party favourites. Hundreds of millions are paid out in contracts so that millions can flow back into the coffers of the party.

Millions of dollars are made when the dump is on fire. Hundreds of truckloads of material have to be brought in at short notice (no time to tender) and at great expense to cover the flammable garbage; and expensive earth-moving equipment has to be hired at short notice (no time to tender) to spread it. There is big money to be made out of the business of solid waste, and politics follows the big money.

Jamaica did not always have so much flammable waste. Plastics have revolutionised our way of life, including our solid-waste arrangements, and Jamaican law has not caught up yet. When drinks were sold in glass bottles, things were not so bad. Glass does not burn, but in any case, few glass items ended up at the public dump. Many bottles were washed and reused, and we had a glass factory that bought all other bottles - whole or broken - which they melted down to make new glass products.

Many bottles had a deposit-return value, and after public events, 'bottle police' would always be seen picking up any stray returnable bottles. Glass itself had economic value, and the bottle police would also scour the roadsides and empty lots for sellable glass (as is done nowadays for scrap metal).

But then sometime in the 1980s, we started to use plastic bottles made of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) for our drinks and other liquid commodities, and the profile of our garbage changed. As plastic replaced glass, more stuff was thrown away, and our solid waste became more combustible. But our legal framework did not change to match, and the cost of solid-waste collection and disposal increased dramatically.

Garbage composition

A Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) study showed that in 2006, Jamaica generated just under 1.5 million tonnes of solid waste, of which just over one million tonnes (69 per cent) was organic compostable waste. Imagine that if we were to turn two-thirds of our garbage into compost, little would be left for Riverton City or other disposal sites such as Retirement, Haddon and Doctor's Wood.

And the compost could be sold to farmers to augment the income of the National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA), or used to fertilise an islandwide beautification effort or tree-planting programme.

Of the 454,000 tonnes of solid waste remaining (in 2006), 203,000 tonnes (45 per cent) was combustible plastic. If the law required that a deposit of $5 had to be made on every plastic bottle - collectible at source - and these plastic bottles were redeemed by the public at convenient points across the island (and sold for recycling), almost no plastic bottles would end up in the garbage dumps to contribute to fires. A new generation of 'bottle police' would emerge.

Overnight, the quantity of plastic ending up at our disposal sites would decrease to nearly zero. And what is more, the volume of solid waste to be collected would decrease dramatically, requiring fewer trucks to collect it, and therefore reducing the expenses of the NSWMA.

Waste paper and cardboard (another 31 per cent of non-compostable solid waste) can also be recycled, leaving an even smaller quantity of garbage to be trucked around Jamaica. The recycled paper and cardboard could be used to reduce our annual paper and cardboard import bill.

I have visited the solid-waste processing facility on little Barbados, where construction rubble is pulverised into road-building material, and where tree cuttings and waste wood are ground into potting mixture. There is no need for unsightly landfills at all!

I have written about this several times before in my twenty-odd years as a columnist with this newspaper. In my view, too many political contracts will become redundant if these ideas are implemented, and too many millions of dollars in political contributions will be lost.

There is big money to be made out of the business of solid waste, and politics follows the big money.

Peter Espeut is a sociologist and environmentalist. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.