by Rod Hughes

It’s a dirty business but someone has to do it. The Sitca S.A. company will treat garbage from the Carbbean port city of Limon plus the towns of Siquirres, Guacimo and Matina, sorting out the organic stuff for processing into gas fuel for home use, recycling the rest and leaving only 30% to place in a landfill.

For the municipalities, it’s a dream plan if it works the way it is presented—the company will actually pay $2 per ton to the municipalities that currently have to shell out $13 per ton to landfills. The only requisite for the towns is that the municipal governments must sign a $20-year contract.

Sitca will install four processing plants at a million dollars each. They will accept commercial waste but it must be non-toxic. For Limon, it will be a way out of a difficult situation where, in the past, residents have been stuck with the 1,600 tons of refuse generated monthly with nowhere to put it. Although the landfills are currently functioning they do have a limited life and are difficult to keep from contaminating the environment, including the precious water table.

The town of Santa Cruz in Guanacaste province is also seeking a solution to trucking its refuse to the nearby town of Filadelfia. They are planning to reopen their landfull on a limited basis, in two “compartments” they hope will provide a relief to the dent that truck fuel makes in their budgets, but the solution is nowhere as elegant as that provided by Sitca.