Do Your Part, Jaltemba Bay: Sort Your trash

Tara A. Spears

While the community leaders fight for a new landfill, we all need to rethink our habits. Yes, the government needs to provide an environmentally safe municipal landfill but each resident –and the thousands of visitors- need to step up and take responsibility, too. More and more people are looking for ways to avoid consuming plastic products and adding to the growing amount of plastic waste ending up in our landfill and ocean. It’s time for all of us to start sorting our waste. It’s not just a matter of appearance, excessive waste and mismanaged trash collection is a vital health issue for humans, animals and the environment.

The concept is fairly simple: not everything is garbage. However, it can still be a challenge to organize your home and disposal system. Once you have a clear recycling system in place, you will soon notice that the entire process becomes much easier to manage. At the recent Sunday informational meeting in La Penita, a newly elected official pledged to quickly get an operational landfill. In the meantime, he suggested that residents sort waste and keep it in their property until the Girsa trash collection can resume. Yes, our coastal community is slow to adopt the recycling process but it’s not too late.

Learn to Sort/ Reuse/ Recycle

Let’s make waste sorting the new cool thing to do for 2021! Composting is the easiest way to make a difference in the environment. Composting should be mandatory because it is easy to do at home. Simply keep a small reusable container in your kitchen and use it to dispose of all organic materials. In case you aren’t certain what constitutes organic stuff- think kitchen scraps, old, leftover food, any non-meat item. Once full, empty your reusable container into a designated bin that’s labeled organic. Wash the reusable container and place it back in your kitchen. If you are composting more sizeable materials like yard waste, you can build an outdoor composting bin, or place biodegradable material like branches, grass clippings, and weeds directly into your organic bin.

Another item that should never be thrown in the garbage to end up in the landfill is glass containers. Bottles and containers should be separated for recycling. An individual that wants to start a glass recycling collection business would do well in a hot beach area: lots of beer and beverage bottles for sure!

Glass can be easily recycled and repurposed. When you recycle your glass bottles, they are taken to a plant where they are cleaned, sorted by color, crushed and melted into new glass products. Glass can always be recycled. You should never throw broken glass in your trash bin, it should always be recycled. Be sure to rinse out all of your glass containers, and remove the lids before you recycle them.

In some areas recycling paper/cardboard products is viable. I don’t see much of that in Jaltemba Bay but it leads to the king of waste: plastic.

The majority of plastic materials are non-biodegradable; therefore it can be detrimental to the environment. But, plastic is an excellent item to recycle. When plastic is recycled, it is purified and melted down. It can be used to create new products, rather than sitting in a landfill and harming the environment. You can recycle any plastics that have the universal recycling symbol (three clockwise arrows) on it.

We need to work every day to divert reusable materials from landfills; once you establish a system in your home, it will become second nature and take no additional time to manage. While we begin sorting and separating our waste at home, it is time for the local government to fulfill their responsibility: a new landfill that is environmentally safe. It is also the responsibility for the government to fund and operate a new program for trash pickup that includes separate bins for the different recyclable materials in addition to real rubbish that will go to the landfill.

Correcting the major landfill/pollution problem won’t happen overnight but even baby steps are an improvement. We’ll all change the way we toss waste and the municipal government could provide the recycling containers and collection of recyclables.

Now is the time to prevent further damage to our beautiful Jaltemba Bay community.