By Leland Baxter-Neal
Friday, March 14, 2008

All 81 Cantons Would Have To Separate Recyclables

Costa Rica’s central government has presented legislation which would make recycling mandatory in all 81 municipalities throughout the country.

The bill would require municipalities to develop waste management plans that include mandatory recycling programs with fines for those who don’t separate recyclable materials — such as paper, plastic and metal — from their regular garbage.

The regulations would apply to both residents and businesses.

“It cannot be voluntary, it must be by law,” said Fabio Molina, director of the Instituto de Fomento y Asesoría Municipal (Institute for Municipal Development, or IFAM).

“It must be across the entire country, and there must be standards, procedures and sanctions for noncompliance,” he said. “You cannot have a canton like Garabito that recycles, and then one next door that doesn’t.”

Currently, only a handful of Costa Rica’s municipalities have launched limited, disparate recycling programs.

According to Mr Molina, all those municipal recycling programs are “pilot programs,” and cover only a few routes or districts, and not entire cantons.

Under the proposed legislation, which is being studied in the Environment Commission of the Legislative Assembly, recycling would be mandatory for all districts in all cantons across the country.

“ Costa Rica is one of the ten most important eco-tourism destinations in the world,” said Mr Molina. “It has to be a model in its policies for the conservation of the environment.”

The law has been thrashed out by the Ministry of Public Health, the Ministry of the Environment and Energy (MINAE), IFAM and the German international cooperation organization GTZ.

Alongside the legislation, a “services platform” is also to be created that would provide assistance, training and funding to the municipalities in getting the programs off the ground.

“We are going to be giving them technical support so that we get this project started,” Mr Molina said.

Garabito, the Central Pacific canton that encompasses Playa Hermosa, Jacó, Herradura, Tárcoles and surrounding communities, is set to launch a municipal recycling program March 24 (see page 15). Initially, that program will be limited just to Jacó.

It is understood this would make Garabito the only municipality on the Pacific coast to have a government-run recycling program. In other areas, however, members of the community and local organizations have attempted to fill the gap.

In neighboring Playa Hermosa, local residents have been trying for more than a year without much success to get a voluntary program off the ground.

In Tamarindo, organizers are planning a recycling day for March 29. A flyer distributed online this week urged local residents, families and businesses to bring paper, plastic, magazines, glass, aluminum, newspapers and magazines, used batteries (including car batteries), plastic shopping bags, and items made of iron, bronze and copper.

The event is an experiment, organizers say, to see if there is enough support to begin a permanent recycling program in town. The event is being organized by Tony Pavelko at recycletamrindo@gmail.com.

Escazú, the municipality at the southwest edge of San José that is home both to traditional ox-drawn carts and luxury high-rise condominiums, was the first local government to implement a recycling program in Costa Rica.

Currently, the municipality has one truck — though it is in the process of purchasing a second — running a few routes throughout the canton, collecting presorted recyclables at no cost to the businesses or residents.

The recyclables are then delivered to a sorting center, where an association that was founded by a group of Escazú women separates and prepares the materials for sale to a variety of businesses, such as Kimberly Clark and Coca-Cola, that use them for producing new products.

According to Nuria Vargas, who has been working on the program for the municipality since 2003, the recycling program is back by TAMU-Costa Rica, a non-governmental organization created by Costa Rican alumni of the US university Texas A&M. That organization helped set up the program and owns the property for the sorting center.

“We collect 50 tonnes of recyclables a month, and collected 600 tonnes last year,” Ms Vargas said, an increase from the approximately 160 tonnes collected in 2002, the program’s first year.

With the addition of a new vehicle, Ms Vargas said, the municipality hopes to expand the program to eventually cover the entire canton — putting it ahead of other municipalities should recycling become law.

The bill that would mandate the recycling programs, called the Ley para la Gestion Integral de Residuos (Law for the Integral Management of Waste), goes beyond those programs, however.

For example, Mr Molino said, it would allow the government to tax businesses importing products which cannot be recycled, as well as Costa Rican companies that create non-recyclable products.

“He who pollutes, pays. If someone imports cars or computers or appliances, they have to know how that will be recycled at the end of its life, or if it isn’t recycled, disposed of without damaging the environment,” Mr Molina said.

“And the Costa Rican producer, just as the Costa Rican importer, has to assume the costs of pollution. It isn’t right that they privatize the business and socialize the environmental damage.”

The initiative also looks to support the creation of businesses around waste management, Mr Molino said, whether it is the formation of associations or cooperatives that handle the sorting and selling of recyclables or the sale of energy created by capturing of the dump’s gasses in a process called “biogas.”

“A balanced policy is going to make the economy more dynamic,” he said. “We are going to take advantage of tonnes of waste, and we are going to generate a lot of work for Costa Rica.”