2 years ago, the Solid Waste Management Authority streamlined how the country handles garbage by turning the dumps in Belize City and Cayo into transfer stations and creating a Sanitary Landfill facility. That's separate from the work that the Department of Environment has been doing with government agencies THAT HANDLE Chemical Waste.
After signing on to major international conventions chemical waste management, the DOE has been laboring since 2005 to put together waste management strategy. We fast-forward to this week when the DOE initiated a 3 year project entitled "Belize Chemicals and Waste Management Project".
The aim of the plan is to control and restrict chemical wastes which the DOE categorizes as Persistent Organic Pollutants, or POP's which include organic pesticides and refrigerants and coolants. What does that mean for you? Well, the main effect is that the DOE is trying to make the cleaner, but these restrictions will affect the industrial sector, whose products generate chemical wastes. The Chief Environmental Officer explained the project to us today:
Martin Allegria, Chief Environmental Officer, DOE
"This projects has four major components. Two of the major ones I could right off the bat tell you is, one, to get rid of or finally dispose of obsolete pesticides, obsolete chemicals such as DDT. Some PCB oils, trying to clean up the Belize environments in some of these private sectors or government sectors that have use these chemicals and dispose of it environmentally abroad. Where? That's what this project is trying to resolve. Europe, Canada, US, we don't know. But that is part of it, so we'll be cleaning up what has been there for years stock pile with possible negative impacts on our health. Secondly, we are trying to incentivize or sensitize private sectors from two angles; One, the solid waste management authority. We have partnered with them, if you have noticed in the boom area, we are rehabilitating the boom to become a transfer station similar to mile 3 and in Cayo. In order to avoid these open dumb burnings as we know it. Why? Because these open dumb burnings include plastics and other hazardous chemicals which eventually damage our health and environment. We are avoiding that by partnering with them to put a good management control into that initiative. We are also working with CIRDI, in the cane farmers with a little plot where we are trying to show that grain harvesting is possible. Grain harvesting will then also avoid all these unintended pollutants in the air from all these massive cane field burning before and after harvesting. So these are just two examples I'm giving you that we are trying to work and where we'll have visible tangible and meaningful effects of this initiative."
The DOE is also trying to focus on more environmentally friendly means of sugar cane farming than what is currently practiced in the north.
Email
Print