| |
Small Islands Voice Global Forum
Wastes are resources, not problems
Here are some more ideas about ways to reduce the amount of garbage produced.
Alice Leney writes about a programme to manage solid waste in Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati, in the Central Pacific: First, our wastes must be seen in terms of resources, not problems. ‘Garbage’ or ‘Rubbish’ is a problem, whereas waste materials are things that can be used. In simple terms the waste stream contains three major components: (1) organic materials (plant and food matter); (2) recyclable or reusable materials (typically metals, glass, cardboard and some plastics); and (3) the remains.
Here in Kiribati, around 75% of the collected waste is plant matter (palm leaves and small branches from gardens); the leftover food goes to feed animals. About another 10% is easily recyclable, being metal, cardboard, glass or plastic bottles. The remains are mostly packaging of various sorts, and discarded consumer items of many types.
The approach must concern separation of wastes, so that management is immediately much easier. In the Kiribati system, a beverage Container Deposit system is under development, where specified bottles and aluminium drink cans have a 5 cent deposit paid on them at import, which is passed down through the commercial system to the consumer – at a fixed level of 5 cents. The consumer then returns the empty beverage container to a collection point, which buys it back at 4 cents per item, with one cent going to help finance the operation (we only have 5c pieces, so consumers bring 5 items at a time for 20c). In this way, these easily recyclable elements are removed from the waste stream by use of a simple economic tool. Cardboard is principally recovered from business (everything is imported in a cardboard box) and the advantage to the business is that they get free removal of a bulky part of their waste stream. This same system can be used to recover cars and fridges for example, using a larger deposit. The required legislation for the Container Deposit system has gone through its first reading in Parliament.
Non-recyclable wastes are collected using biodegradable ‘Green Bags’ and the garbage collectors will only pick up Green Bags. Plant matter (branches and palm leaves) will not fit into a Green Bag. So organic material stays close to the point of origin and since Tarawa is an atoll, and the soil is very sandy and poor, the organic material helps to nourish the soil.
All recycled and re-useable materials are collected in the Materials Recovery Facility, which, by handling all resources from the waste stream in one place, can effectively cut costs by sharing the administrative burdens. The population of Tarawa is about 35,000, so the volume of waste is small; the land area, being an atoll, is also very small, so population densities are in fact quite high.
To do all this effectively a public education and awareness program is run alongside the physical waste recycling and collection systems. Slogans have been developed that have gained very wide currency: ‘Kiribati Te Boboto’ (roughly: ‘Make Kiribati Beautiful’) which is printed on all the Green Bags, and also the side of the rubbish trucks; and the recycling system is called ‘Kaoki Mange!’ (‘Return the Rubbish!’) as all the recyclables are exported.
The bottom line is that wastes must be seen as resources and not problems. Seeing wastes as resources also will drive economic and regulatory tools to prevent ‘difficult’ wastes from even getting into the waste stream in the first place; for example in Kiribati, there have been problems in the past with broken glass from beer bottles, now beer in glass bottles has a very high import duty, resulting in very little consumption of beer in glass bottles.
Bridget Hogg from The Bahamas (Caribbean) suggests a brown bag or canister approach: I was a university student in Jamaica in the 80's. During this time, items such as rice and flour were sold in plain brown paper bags. It would seem that the materials were imported in bulk containers and then retailed in the simple brown bag. Since we don’t actually benefit from the pretty non-biodegradable plastic bags, we should seriously consider an alternative. The brown bags had some faults in that they tore easily and did not prevent pests from entering the food. We could however consider a ‘canister sale’ approach. Consumers could opt to purchase their goods as before, or get a price discount if they brought their own standard re-usable canister. (Standard empty canisters would initially have to be issued by retailers). Bulk imports could then be distributed in this way. To save on manpower issues, a pre-calibrated machine could be set up to issue 0.5, 1 and 2 kg amounts automatically (possibly a sensor could ‘read’ the canister size via bar code).
It’s time for us in the small islands to realise that our land is in short supply and unless we eventually want to live in a dump, we have to take a more serious approach to solid waste management. Individually our purchasing power is small but as a group we DO have a voice.
| |
Small Islands Voice Global Forum is maintained by Administrator with WebBBS 5.01.