By, Matthew Forde (Submitted as part of his HUMN 3099 Caribbean Studies Thesis on The History of Recycling Businesses in Barbados)
Barbados has had a long history of maintaining some principles of
sustainable development in order to protect its fragile island environment and
economy. As early as 300 years ago, planters sought to protect the environment
from soil erosion and soil exhaustion by utilising dung generated by livestock to
maintain soil fertility and introducing the cane-hole to adapt to environmental
constraints. Barbados’s early sugar plantation development was characterized by
the use of animal-powered mills, and then windmills utilising renewable energy.
Later, steam-powered mills utilised recycled materials such as crushed cane
stalks or bagasse as fuel. Due to their limited material circumstances,
Barbadians have been reusing, reducing and recycling for generations.
Barbadians accommodated recycling as a means of survival. For example, they
used cuss-cuss grass for bedding, green trimmings for firewood and compost, or
broom-making. Barbadians also reused plastic, metal and glass containers for
storage of various items. However, since the development of sanitation policy
with regular garbage collection and the creation of a landfill, Barbadians,
like others all over the globe, are now engaged in a ‘throwaway’ culture that
has led to an overflowing landfill and increasing concern over the
sustainability of regular garbage collection.
To understand the development of recycling and sustainable
development in Barbados, we must appreciate the local and international
context, which would have influenced both areas. By the 1970s, efforts to
modernize recycling in Barbados were developing partly to tackle Barbados’s
growing garbage problem. In 1974, the W.B. Hutchinson Group of Companies, which
manufactured plastics in the island, set up a subsidiary company, Industrial
Fibres Limited to “cash in on the worldwide trend to make money out of garbage”.
Barbados’s recycling sector has grown over
the last 25 years through entrepreneurship and innovation, and has contributed
to the country’s economic, social and environmental sustainability. Early
entrepreneurs created various businesses and programmes, which could confront
the garbage problem in the island whilst provided other commercial services.
Patrick Blackman and later Andrew Simpson
owned and operated Envirotech Inc., which began in 1993, collecting, crushing
and exporting used glass to Trinidad for recycling. Needing a larger collection point, their operations moved to
the Belle Plantation.
Envirotech then partnered with Barbados’s Tourism Development
Corporation in the face of a rapidly increasing hotel sector which was
generating plenty recyclable waste. To Stephen Medford, paper
and cardboard, was to him what glass and plastic was to Blackman and Simpson.
Medford, took some hard knocks in the scrap paper and recycling business in
England before carving out an attractive niche for himself at Caribbean Waste
Recycling Limited (CWRL) on Roebuck Street. Additionally, pioneers such as, Dr.
Colin Hudson, was considered as one of the leading voices in the fight for
sustainable development on the island. Under commission from then Governor
General, Dame Nita Barrow in 1994, a low cost exposition of sustainable
technologies was created eventually leading to the creation of the
environmental charity, the Future Centre Trust.
Today, the escalating tonnage of garbage
per day of highly compostable and recyclable, solid waste (SW) has become a
critical concern. In Barbados efforts to create a successful sustainable
development model has realised recycling as the “second most environmentally
sound” strategy for dealing with SW following only the preventive strategy of
source reduction and reuse. Despite several private and governmental challenges
to recycling, well known players in the field today include; the largest
privately owned Material Recovery Facilities (MRF) business in Barbados, Sustainable
Barbados Recycling Centre (SBRC), which is contracted by Government to sort its
waste.
Barbados has also been addressing the safe disposal and
recycling of e-waste with Caribbean E-waste Management Inc. owned and managed
by Nadaline Cummings.
A number of traders/ brokers in Barbados have succeeded in
establishing businesses that generate interest in recycling. Examples such as
Paul Bynoe of B’s Recycling and Stephen Foster of Dice-a-bed Barbados Ltd are
two considerations. These companies provide unique, diverse and innovative
solutions in waste collection, recovery and recycling to both public and
private sector organisations.
Notwithstanding these major players, several
other small to medium sized recyclers have also embarked on providing recycling
services in Barbados.
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