7 News Belize

Getting Rid of Belize’s Chemical Waste
posted (February 9, 2017)
Today the Department of Environment held a training workshop for partners involved in the production and removal of chemical waste. For the past few years the Department has been working to get rid of chemical waste leftover in the country. That's where POLYECO comes in; the Greek company has been contracted to identify, collect, remove and dispose of our chemical waste in an environmentally friends manner. Chief Environmental Officer Martin Alegria and the POLYECO consultant told us more about the project.

Martin Alegria - Chief Environmental Officer
"Today we have a 2-day training seminar, first day theory, and second day practical in Cayo District. It's targeting chemical and hazardous waste, management and disposal. Starting first with this initiative in terms of today's training, it's a part of a project we started last year to look at those chemicals we had in inventory far back as 2006 and 2010/2012, that we knew were in Belize and disposal in an environment friendly manner, these include for example DDTs that had been there for over 20 years, BCBs soils that are very hazardous in terms of cancer causing. Obsolete pesticides, that people have either expired or lost labels and don't know what it is. So we needed to do inventory of all and the little industrial chemicals that we may have. As you know Belize is a heavy industrialize country so we don't have much industrial chemicals, so those are the types of chemicals that today through the services of a company called POLYECO out of Greece that was successful in the bids that we tendered out some months ago. they are the ones doing the - the big job is to dispose environmentally friendly, those chemicals some 20, 30 to 40 tons of all those different types of chemicals somewhere in Europe for final disposal, where at the end we will get a certification that those were environmentally dispose of with the technologies that will not cause any negative impacts to human health or the environment."

Alex Courtenay, 7News
"Now you said we don't really have the capability to properly dispose of these chemical waste in an environmentally friendly manner. Is that something that maybe the ministry or the department of environment is looking to in the future where, that would be where we want to be?"

Martin Alegria - Chief Environmental Officer
"That was part of the whole assessment analysis that has been already especially 2012 onwards, but the volume that we have in Belize is so small even at a regional scale, Caribbean or Central America, the amount of hazardous chemicals that is generated at the end is so small that it wouldn't be suffice to have a technology to dispose of it."

Alex Courtenay, 7News
"Is this something that we need to be doing every couple years? Do we generate the waste that we need to be sending to France every so often or because I understand that we have had waste here from the 1980's and we haven't sent it out yet. So is that something that we need to be worried about really?"

George Chrysanthopoulus - Chemical Engineer/POLYECO Consultant
"Hazardous waste management is something very important and of course it's something for every country that must happen. The role POLYECO is to bring the know how in order to handle this kind of hazardous waste and properly dispose them. We have been cooperating in the past with mainly final disposal facilities in Europe. So for every project of ours, the first phase is a reporting of hazardous waste, this means handling them and the second phase is about shipping the waste into those licensed facilities."

The chemical waste will be shipped out to France, where it will be incinerated without risk of hazard.





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