A FACILITY to recover valuable materials from commercial waste is to be constructed at the Riverton City landfill in Kingston at a cost of $14.5 million.
The contract, which has been put to tender, is the latest plan in the phased development of the area, which is to include upgrading of the landfill, the establishment of a community compost heap, and material collection centres.
When constructed, the facility will be one of the biggest for sorting waste. It will have conveyor belts that will move the waste from the tipper truck to the appropriate sorting points.
The project will be funded under the Government of Jamaica/Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) loan for the development of Riverton City, and will be handled by the project executing unit in the Ministry of local Government and Community Development.
Once completed, the unit will hand over the management of the facility to the National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA). The authority may manage the facility itself or contract it out to the private sector.
The newly-formed NSWMA manages household solid waste. This is because of its statutory status, which enjoins it to deal primarily with taxpayers. Commercial waste is handled by private entities.
However, all household and commercial wastes are trucked to the Riverton landfill site that is being managed by the NSWMA, which operates under the National Solid Waste Management Act, 2001.
The Riverton City landfill is the current disposal site for the Kingston Metropolitan Region, which includes St. Thomas, St. Catherine, Kingston and St. Andrew and Clarendon.
"This landfill will act as a pilot project, which will be replicated islandwide. Retirement takes waste from the Western Region and that landfill is to be developed or rehabilitated," a spokesperson from the NSWMA told JIS News.
"The plans are not necessarily to put disposal sites in every parish or region, what we would develop are transfer stations, where waste is collected and stored for a short while and then transferred by large trucks to the regional landfill. The process of identifying the sites for the additional landfills and their transfer stations is currently being done," the spokesperson added.
Currently, there are informal sorters on the Riverton site and although it is a hazard to their health and a danger to their lives by operating near large equipment, they still derive an economic benefit from removing PET bottles, fabrics, metals, glass and other materials, which they sell.
The fabrics are sold to auto mechanics, for example, to soak up oil, while the PET bottles are returned to the Wisynco plant.
"Whilst we do not encourage them to sort out the waste, we have allowed a certain amount of sorting. What we are going to do in the long term is make the landfill a proper sanitary landfill, which will be complemented by the proposed materials recovery facility," the NSWMA said.
