The Belize Solid Waste Management Project continues on schedule. The first phase has been completed and come the start of the New Year, the second phase is expected to commence with the building of the sanitary landfill just off the Western Highway at mile twenty four. The Solid Waste Management Project involves the Western Corridor covering San Pedro town, Caye Caulker village as well as the twin towns of San Ignacio and Santa Elena. That is roughly fifty percent of the nation’s population, which generates a significant amount of solid waste. Director of the Solid Waste Management Authority Gilroy Lewis says the project aims to improve the solid waste management in the western corridor, as well as clean up the country’s aesthetic image. The government of Belize signed off on the project in 2009 and going into the second year, the project will see the Belize City dumpsite at mile three on the Western Highway transformed into what is being called a transfer station.
Gilroy Lewis – Director, Solid Waste Management
“The operations at that it dumpsite is unsustainable in terms of capacity, the nuisance situation that arises there in terms of odor, pests, vermin, fires, flies and so forth. Component one of the project will close off from an engineering point of view that dumpsite and a transfer station will be built there. We are hoping to build an enclosed structure and then the trucks that collect the garbage in the city will drive inside of that building and then there is a concrete tipping floor where they would dump the garbage and then they would drive out again. So when you look there you would not see anything because everything will be taking place inside. We hope that people will still recover some of the materials off the tipping floor and when that is completed we would have a front end loader that we would use to load the garbage into 40 foot trailers. Once these trailers are filled then the trailers would be hauled to the mile 24 sanitary landfill.”
The access road leading to where the Sanitary Landfill will be established has already been constructed. Lewis says that component two of the western corridor solid waste management project is right on target.
Gilroy Lewis – Director, Solid Waste Management
“We are hoping that by January, February of 2012 we would start the construction of the sanitary landfill so we wanted the road to be placed first so that we have access to the facility. So that is component two of the project which is the sanitary landfill in itself and the construction of the access road. People might wonder what is a sanitary landfill, in comparison to a dumpsite. The major difference between a sanitary landfill and a dumpsite is one of control and order. In a dumpsite what you have is a haphazard operation, the trucks just come in and then they dump the garbage anywhere, they could even dump it on the access road to the site itself and what it does is that the garbage just back up into the highway, everything there is not controlled, it does not have any cover material so that the flies does not have access to the garbage, there is no compaction, so all these defficiences cause environmental impacts.”
Lewis says the new sanitary landfill will eliminate a lot of the environmental impacts currently posed by the Belize City dumpsite.
Gilroy Lewis – Director, Solid Waste Management
“For example there the impacts there are to the water because that is a wetland. There’s water under the garbage dump so ground water is being impacted and then that might migrate to the sea and so on. You also have the odor from the degrading garbage, whenever it catches fire then you have the additional problem of all the smoke and the quality of life is also impaired by managing a dumpsite. We find out that people believe that dumpsites are the cheapest thing but in fact they are not that cheap because to remediate that site."
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