Belize City, April 12th 2008 - We have all heard of “junk food” and “junk mail”, but what about “junk money”. What if you could get back, somehow, even a little bit of the money spent on the junk that is just sitting all over at home or work? Well, you really can. The Belize Recycling Company (BRC) wants to buy your garbage, as long as it is paper or metal.

Three years ago BRC opened recycling stations in Belize, with its headquarters on Jude Street in Belize City.

BRC is managed by Dussan’s wife, Adriana Uribe. She explained that her husband opened a recycling company in Belize to produce material for Caribbean Paper.

  Adriana Uribe

When BRC opened in February 2005, it only recycled generic paper; newspapers, magazines, books, note pads, phone directories, typing sheets and cardboard boxes. Stickers, onion papers, carbon paper, tissue and napkin were not accepted for recycle.

BRC pays 4 cents for every pound of disposed paper they get. Cardboard paper is bought at 2 cents per pound. The paper collected by the company is taken to its Fairweather St. warehouse where it is categorized into types and then transported to the Western Highway factory.

After a year in business the company realized that it was not collecting enough paper because it mostly relies on companies or persons to take material to them, and since it was mostly newspaper and printing companies who delivered; therefore, it made a key decision to start recycling metal.

While Belize produces much more paper trash than scrap or unwanted metal per year, the business of recycling metal is more lucrative, said Uribe.

Therefore BRC pays more for the metal it buys. They pay 6 cents for every pound of iron, 3 cents for a pound of copper, 50 cents for every pound of aluminium and $6 for automobile batteries.

The metal collected is taken to the factory and compacted for export to El Salvador and Guatemala.

Uribe pointed out that there is still much uncollected garbage in Belize which can be recycled or is properly disposed of. This can become a problem for a country that markets itself as an environment-friendly tourist destination.

According to BRC’s research, on an average every person produces up to two pounds of trash a day, of which 20% is paper. In a month, the country can potentially produce up to 120 tons of garbage. If only every single paper and metal ended up at BRC’s recycling stations, and the rest of refuse at its proper location, the Western Highway dump site, our streets and neighbourhoods would be much cleaner spaces.

  BRC's office on Jude St.

In 2007, BRC only collected 442 tons of material for recycle, just about 32 tons every month. The rest of debris either continued to lie on the streets, our backyards, homes, offices or was picked up by sanitation company Belize Waste Control and taken to the dump site for burning.

It would be expected that the City Council, as the municipal body in charge of sanitation, and the sanitation companies would find it useful and profitable to sell the trash they collect to BRC, but that doesn’t happen. When BRC began its operations, sanitation companies felt that they were in competition therefore establishing working relations has been very difficult. But BRC is in the business of recycling, not necessarily collecting garbage, and sanitation companies and Government should seriously re-consider a recycle plan with them.

Poor civic pride and an ineffective national sanitation strategy are the main reasons Belize remains a dirty country today. If every person made it his or her responsibility to discard their garbage in the proper and secure places, we would stop making excuses about why Belize cannot look as clean as Chetumal.

  Scrap metal laying around can be recycled

But fostering a culture of cleanliness among our population has been very slow in coming. There should be a great focus to prepare the next generation to take on the challenge.

To instil that mentality of cleanliness in our young population, in 2006 BRC launched a school competition “Read, Write, Recycle” which required schools to deliver their paper trash for recycle. The school that turned in the most in quantity received a prize. At the end of the competition, BRC collected a total of 106 tons of trash.

Uribe said BRC will continue its public information of the financial incentives they offer to those who discard their trash properly and, most importantly, the significance of recycling. She pointed out that for every ton of paper used a tree is cut down to produce it. Recycling not only safeguards the environment, but also conserves energy.

Uribe also said that her husband’s long-term goal is to open a branch of Caribbean Paper in Belize, where the material collected and processed from BRC can be used to produce the Softy & Elite paper brand right here. “For that to happen we would have to collect all the paper Belize does not use,” she said.