Guyana – no programme yet for plastic waste disposal

Neither the Guyana Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) nor the municipalities have a programme in place for recycling plastic waste, and the impediment to finding workable solutions may lie in the lack of financial viability for everything proposed so far.



Stabroeknews.com reports that plastic bottles (PET), Styrofoam food boxes and plastic bags continue to clog drainage ways in places along the coast, causing a problem for the free flow of water. Plastic bottle littering has turned into one of the biggest environmental challenges for Guyana with an estimated 500,000 plastic bottles discarded each month. This was manifested in the floods of 2005, which clearly demonstrated that drainage systems had been seriously compromised due to blockage.



Speaking to Stabroek News , a senior officer of the EPA said that all the agency is involved in is awareness – advising persons to reduce and reuse their plastics.



The officer said that she knows of no initiative that the EPA is involved in either on its own or in partnership with other entities to find a solution to the problem of plastics. Some months ago, the EPA held a poster competition for children looking at ways to deal with the problem facing Guyana from the huge build-up of plastics in the environment.



Efforts to reach the relevant persons at Banks DIH proved futile over the past days. For some time now Banks DIH and Demerara Distillers Limited have had their own in-house recycling facilities for their waste.



The two beverage companies had been part of a national committee formed around May 2002 with a mandate to explore solutions to plastics. This committee had also been mandated to come up with a national plan involving a number of regional systems.



But according to a source in the industry, all of the meetings and workshops held with stakeholders amounted to nothing because the primary problem seems to be the financing of initiatives to get rid of the plastics.



The source said that the problem might be tied to trying to find money-making ventures to deal with the issue and this might not be possible.



He said that though the amount of plastic in the environment may seem overwhelming, the amounts are not commercially viable when collected and compacted.



Additionally, the source said that during one of the many workshops, a company based in Barbados wanted to buy compacted plastic from Guyana and wanted the M&CC to play a part in the collection and compaction of plastic waste. But according to the source, the M&CC was uncomfortable with the proposal since it would have meant a lot of money being spent in terms of setting up the systems of collection and compaction.



He suggested that the best bet may be to devise a system of collection of the recyclable waste and dispose of it in the waste management facilities at Mandela and Haag Bosch – which will soon come on stream – without tying economic gain to it.



One project that this newspaper had reported on some years ago started out with a proposal to collect and chip up plastic waste for recycling overseas.



Personnel from both Banks DIH Limited and DDL had been a part of the now defunct national committee on plastic waste disposal, which had been established around May 2002. That committee is in the process of being resuscitated so that it could carry out its mandate, which is to come up with a national plan for plastic waste disposal involving a number of regional systems>http://www.>