The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

A Bahamian non-profit organisation has won a $50,000 United Nations (UN) grant that will finance construction of a prototype recycling depot and enable it to salvage different materials.

Khonica Prosa, an executive with Cans for Kids, yesterday told a Bahamas Society of Engineers (BSE) that the recycling depot should be completed by October this year.

And the UN grant will also enable the non-profit to expand its recycling efforts beyond just aluminium cans, as it has already moved into plastics, and is beginning to look at cardboard and glass, too.

Ms Prosa, though, said it had been “a monumental task” to interest Bahamians in recycling, although the progress made to-date was starting to bear fruit.

And she added that Cans for Kids had “not been too well received by the Government”, with no assistance rendered by the latter with any of its programmes.

Cans for Kids, which was founded in 1996 by Waste Not principal, Ginny McKinney, has solely been focused on the collection of waste aluminium cans pre-grant.

These are collected by schools and youth organisations. A densifier at Waste Not then compresses these cans into briquettes, and they are then shipped to the ‘end-sourcer’ in the US.

Cans for Kids foots all the collection, conversion and shipping costs, and pays $0.30 per pound of aluminium - once the funds are received from the US sourcer - to fund various programmes at the schools and youth organisations.

Ms Prosa said the UN grant was being used to effectively “relaunch” Cans for Kids, plus develop a recycling depot that should be complete by October.

“In obtaining the grant, we decided we wanted to branch out into other recycling areas,” she added.

Hence the move into cardboard, glass and plastic bottles. Bahamas Waste was assisting in the supply of raw and used cardboard, but Ms Prosa said Cans for Kids’ move into plastics recycling had been delayed by its search for an ‘end sourcer’ similar to the one it used for the cans.

With no such company in the Bahamas, it was again looking to the US for a company that used recycled plastics materials.

“Aside from cardboard and the cans, it’s moving forward slower than we had planned, but we are making progress in that area,” Ms Prosa said. “Through the grant we’re figuring out better methods of recycling in the Bahamas.”

She added that Cans for Kids was hoping that recycling depots, similar to the prototype, would be rolled out through Nassau neighbourhoods and in the Family Islands over the next five years.

“Just getting people interested in recycling efforts has been a monumental effort to say the least,” Ms Prosa said, disclosing that Cans for Kids was set to imminently launch a marketing campaign to promote its expanded initiatives.

“We’ve realised a lot of people are not aware of it; they want to recycle, but are not aware of what’s going on with recycling in the Bahamas,” she added.

Besides raising funds to benefit young Bahamians, Cans for Kids’ efforts are also geared to benefiting the environment, reducing the waste volume going into the New Providence landfill, and develop potential new energy sources.

Yet the non-profit’s efforts have received little to no support or encouragement from the Government.

Ms Prosa said: “We are not collaborating with the Government in any way. We’ve not been received too well by them.

“We’re still trying to get in with the Ministry of the Environment and government agencies. We’ve submitted a few proposals to them and not heard anything back.

“Unfortunately, the Government hasn’t been too helpful in what we’ve been trying to do, but we’re still working on links with them.”