The Bahamas has signed the following international conventions,
agreements, and protocols relating to solid waste management,
including the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary
Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Vienna Convention
for the Protection of the Ozone Layer and the United
Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOS). The Government
of The Bahamas has the responsibility to minimize the amount and toxicity of wastes generated, and to work toward environmentallysound
solid waste management(SENES Consultants Limited, 2005).
The Inter-American Development Bank has worked with the
Ministry of Works and the Environment to fund solid-waste management
improvements through the development of regional
landfills and waste transfer stations8. However, there is no dedicated
revenue stream to operate, improve or expand present waste
managementfacilities;this would include a costly option ofmoving
all solid waste to one island for processing.
Lastly, the issues of outreach and education are crucial to managing
expectations and encouraging compliance in recycling. Work
place education needs to be implemented with department heads
and unions to ensure a smooth implementation of a sorted solid
waste stream from resorts and hotels. Resorts such as SEB as well
as island residents need to embrace the consumer limitations of
island life, and reduce the solid waste accumulation. The public
receives a mixed message abouttrash, illegal dumping and littering
when communities pay residents to clean up road verges and illegal
dumping instead of fining violators. Solid waste management and
recycling education needs to be developed as a food security and
poverty reduction issue for Exuma residents facing high costs of
living. Any discussion of agriculture can include solid waste management
and the availability of compost as a fertilizer alternative.
Large resorts should facilitate or fund industrial scale composting,
including waste water sludge that could reduce reliance on
imported fertilizers, allow water recovery, and reduce the threat
of nutrient loading to near shore marine environments. This study
did not address the expectations and attitudes oftourists coming to
SEB. The all-inclusive buffet-style meals that required food orders
to be placed weeks in advance for shipment to Exuma are certainly
contributing to the amount of food wastes.
Other categories of solid waste, such as plastics, glass and
metal cans, were documented, and benchmarked, but this report
addressed only food and grease wastes. Plastics were the second
major material category produced in the SEB kitchens, but plastics
are the most difficult category to recover or to re-use; over 85% of
plastics globally are not recycled and much of the material ends
up in the oceans (Shamshiry et al., 2011). Resorts like Sandals are
looking to build brand reputation, and innovate to new markets.
Tourism companies can be strongly motivated by “trustworthy”
solid waste management, as an alternative to government regulation.
This issue of “trustworthy” trash management was especially
pertinent to The Bahamas. Producers have no concerns with solid
waste beyond having the waste hauled away. Trash Haulers get
paid to move trash, and then governments are left with the longterm
costs and consequences of waste management (Mateu-Sbert
et al., 2013). Recycling can seem to be a futile effort. Recycling bins
and transfer stations are designed to sort individual commodities,
but this reprocessing is very expensive for small islands. Recycling
equipment investment is very expensive, and unwarranted by current
resort operations or government guidelines.Recycling requires
a “clean” and secure supply chain to be profitable; moving of solid
waste from island to island would require clean, sorted streams
of commodities such as aluminum cans or scrap metal. Movement
of derelict cars to a central location for export does occur when
market conditions make the scrap metal transport profitable. The
Bahamas could overcome these transport costs to re-purpose waste
at one central location; however the investment in barges or hauling
vessels would need to be offset by documented environmental
valuation of protecting wetlands, preserving groundwater or mitigating
pollutants.