The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

A BISX-listed company yesterday pleaded with the private sector to help make its $1 million cardboard recycling investment “work”, telling Tribune Business it wanted to avoid the initiative’s “shut down”.

Francisco de Cardenas, Bahamas Waste’s managing director, said the company was currently collecting just 5-10 per cent of the waste cardboard generated by corporate Bahamas - a volume nowhere near sufficient to generate a “break even” level of cardboard recycling.

Conceding that none of Bahamas Waste’s environmental-related initiatives “have proven very successful” to-date, Mr de Cardenas said greater support for its cardboard recycling initiative would not only benefit the company but result in a “win-win” for the country as a whole.

He estimated that between 100-200 tonnes of cardboard was being emptied into the Tonique Williams-Darling landfill on a daily basis, accounting for between 10-20 per cent of the total waste volume the facility dealt with.

Removing cardboard as a waste stream would not only reduce pressure on an already-overstretched public landfill, Mr de Cardenas explained, but allow Bahamas Waste to turn it into a foreign exchange/export owner by sending recycled 100-tonne bails to China.

The BISX-listed company was targeting two export shipments per month to make its cardboard recycling initiative viable, but Mr de Cardenas conceded it had “along way to go” after dispatching just five shipments during the whole of 2012.

“We’re just not getting the volume,” he told Tribune Business. “The costs associated with collecting cardboard are difficult, because it is not worth very much. We can’t afford to buy it. The economics don’t make sense.

“But it’s all going into the landfill and we don’t want that. We’d like to back it out; get it out of the waste stream. For any island nation it’s important to recycle whatever we get so it doesn’t go into the landfill.

“We’re estimating there’s probably between 100-200 tonnes of cardboard a day. If you figure, for argument’s sake, that there’s 1,000 tonnes of waste going into the landfill daily, 10-20 per cent of it is card.”

More companies passing their cardboard on to Bahamas Waste would thus free up “space in the landfill”, which is already bursting at the seams via all the junk generated by New Providence. The private sector would also avoid the tipping fees associated with disposing the cardboard in the landfill.

Mr de Cardenas told Tribune Business that the likes of Atlantis, AML Foods and Kelly’s were on board with the cardboard recycling effort, but support from others in the private sector had been “very limited”.

Acknowledging that some companies had limited storage space where they could hold waste cardboard, Mr de Cardenas said Bahamas Waste had a daily pick-up service specifically to collect this product from large users.

Once at its Gladstone Road facility, Mr de Cardenas explained that the cardboard was ‘separated’ to make sure there were no “contaminants”, then bailed. Five employees worked on the recycling operation.

“This bailer that we have produces over one-tonne bails, and it can do six-eight bails in an hour,” the Bahamas Waste managing director told Tribune Business.

“We have to wait to get a good enough volume before it gets shipped. We try to ship, at a minimum, 100 tonnes a load.”

Mr de Cardenas said Bahamas Waste sent about 735 tonnes of recycled cardboard to China in 2012, representing five shipments.

“We need to consistently get out two shipments a month. We have a long way to go,” he told this newspaper of the two year-old cardboard recycling initiative.

“All our environmental initiatives have not proven to be very successful. I don’t want to see them shut down.

“Obviously, we need to make them work. There’s only so much we can do. We just need a little more community support. Break even would be nice.”

Recycling and other ‘green’ initiatives were vital to the economic sustainability of island nations, Mr de Cardenas said, adding: “We can use, re-use, it’s a win-win.

“But there’s a cost to these things, and it’s not going to automatically happen. We’ve invested a significant amount of money in the [cardboard] facility to get it right. It’s pretty close to $1 million.”

Bahamas Waste’s cardboard recycling drive had also been hit by the commodities downturn over the past two years, which has dropped the price it receives for exported cardboard by 50 per cent since shipments began.

“We have to put that aside and keep on going,” Mr de Cardenas told Tribune Business. “The ability to take something that’s going into the landfill and be able to ship it out and do something else with it, it’s a tremendous environmental initiative.”

The Bahamas Waste managing director also hinted that the Bahamas needed government and environmental policies, plus economic incentives, that encouraged initiatives such as cardboard recycling, and pushed persons to support them.