4. Discussion and summary
Solid waste management should include recycling or reuse
of material for both cost savings, environmental protection, and
revenue enhancements. Unfortunately for SIDS, the long-term
environmental costs of dumps and landfills are seldom considered.
Removal of food and compostable waste was the easiest and more
efficient way for solid waste reduction and improved sanitation
near resorts. However, the volume of food and compostable wastes
needs to be carefully calculated to allow for removal, composting
and sorting systems that can respond to changes in hotel occupancy.
The recycling pilot project direct benefits were to reduce
solid waste entering the ERSL and eliminate the unsorted solid
waste compactor used at SEB associated with the flies and rats
associated with unsorted solid waste. Indirect benefits included
consumption of fewer plastic bags in waste management, reduction
in pest management costs, and improved morale in employees
seeing the foreign-owned corporation investing in the Bahamian
island environment.
EWM and RE entered a partnership with SEB resort to recycle
compostable food and cooking grease wastes as a component
of EarthCheck benchmarking for hotel green certification. A oneyear
pilot project illustrated some of challenges and barriers to
recycling and solid waste reduction on Out Islands of The Bahamas.
Those challenges can be considered in terms of logistics and labor
costs, the economy of scale for island recycling, and lastly the
outreach and education requirements. Successful integrated solid
waste management requires the essential components of government
regulation, producer accountability and consumer awareness
(See Table 5 for description of stakeholders).
First, perhaps the greatest barrier to island recycling is
economics–the short-term costs and re-training required to change
old habits and embrace new technologies. Recycling would be ideally
implemented in steps, and issues of environmental health
would mandate a timetable for integrated solid waste sorting by
location. Labor issues are understandably an issue for SEB; there
are no resources to re-train and re-design service collection areas
for sorted waste streams. Although the kitchen staff could make the
change to sort food waste into the buckets relatively quickly, the
stewarding staff had to keep up with removal of full buckets and resupplying
empty buckets. The waste buckets required an increased
work load. The stewarding staff was less enthusiastic about additional
work with limited resources, citing the problems of storage of
empty buckets, and the additional time needed to collect, and distribute
empty buckets to allthe kitchens. SEB management was not
in a position to re-negotiate labor relations with stewarding staff;
thus recycling or solid waste management initiatives are hard to
retro-fit. The message from SEB management was,” Sandals wants
to be EarthCheck certified, but not put any new resources into this
effort”. New resorts and hotels can consider recycling needs (that
can be mandated by the government) at the start of operations.
SEB management failed to support the recycling initiative by
identifying trained staff with appropriate resources. As in most
resorts, the Environmental Health and Safety Manager must work
across departments and has few resources; thus environmental
initiatives have to bring immediate economic benefits to individual
departments (e.g. less money spent on plastic trash bags, or
less staff time spent cleaning the compactor room). The turnover
of SEB staff and management proved to be an issue in long-term
environmental program implementation.
There are larger labor issues associated with island tourism:
many workers are brought in from other countries or other islands
in The Bahamas, and there is little investment in the local environmental
quality of Exuma. Most workers associated with solid
waste management are paid minimum wage in The Bahamas,
meaning that a full time worker (40 h per week) earns about
$11,429 per year5. However the cost of living on the Out Islands of