Seigo­nie Mo­hammed

Cli­mate Change Ed­i­tor

seigo­nie.mo­hammed@guardian.co.tt

Al­most half of the waste en­ter­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go’s land­fills is or­gan­ic ma­te­r­i­al, which pro­duces methane as it de­com­pos­es and can con­tribute to land­fill fires, ac­cord­ing to en­vi­ron­men­tal com­pa­ny Close the Loop Caribbean.

The com­pa­ny is now seek­ing to di­vert thou­sands of tonnes of or­gan­ic waste from land­fills and con­vert it in­to com­post, with a tar­get of pro­cess­ing near­ly 20,000 tonnes an­nu­al­ly by 2031.

How­ev­er, ques­tions re­main over how the ini­tia­tive will be fi­nanced, how waste will be trans­port­ed to the fa­cil­i­ty, and whether a vi­able lo­cal mar­ket ex­ists for the car­bon cred­its ex­pect­ed to help sus­tain the project.

Those con­cerns emerged dur­ing a stake­hold­er con­sul­ta­tion for the Close the Loop: Com­post for Cli­mate Project at the Cen­tre of Ex­cel­lence in Ma­coya on Tues­day.

Close the Loop Caribbean chief op­er­at­ing of­fi­cer Say­eed Ali de­scribed or­gan­ic waste as a sig­nif­i­cant but large­ly un­tapped re­source.

“Al­most half of the garbage in Trinidad and To­ba­go’s land­fill is or­gan­ic waste,” Ali said.

“This re­leas­es methane, a harm­ful green­house gas. It fu­els land­fill fires. It dri­ves cli­mate change. And all of that has re­al, tan­gi­ble neg­a­tive en­vi­ron­men­tal and health im­pacts on com­mu­ni­ties.”

The project is ex­pect­ed to process ap­prox­i­mate­ly 2,005 tonnes of or­gan­ic waste an­nu­al­ly in its ini­tial phase, scal­ing up to about 19,582 tonnes per year by 2031.

De­spite the pro­ject­ed in­crease, Ali ac­knowl­edged the scale of the chal­lenge.

“This sounds like a lot, but the re­al­i­ty is this is still just a drop in the buck­et, and there’s still much more to do,” he said.

At the Or­ange Grove fa­cil­i­ty, or­gan­ic ma­te­r­i­al such as grass clip­pings and tree cut­tings is sort­ed, shred­ded and arranged in­to com­post­ing piles known as windrows, where tem­per­a­ture and mois­ture lev­els are close­ly mon­i­tored.

Op­er­a­tions man­ag­er Jonathan Casimire said the process re­quires con­tin­u­ous man­age­ment to main­tain the right con­di­tions for de­com­po­si­tion.

“We want to turn it to in­tro­duce oxy­gen so the or­gan­isms could breathe. We don’t want to suf­fo­cate them,” he said.

The re­sult­ing com­post can be used in soil prod­ucts, cre­at­ing a pro­duc­tive al­ter­na­tive for ma­te­r­i­al that would oth­er­wise be buried in land­fills.

A key com­po­nent of the project’s ex­pan­sion strat­e­gy is the gen­er­a­tion of car­bon cred­its. Close the Loop is pur­su­ing cer­ti­fi­ca­tion that would al­low ver­i­fied re­duc­tions in green­house-gas emis­sions from di­vert­ed or­gan­ic waste to be con­vert­ed in­to mar­ketable cred­its.

One stake­hold­er ques­tioned whether Trinidad and To­ba­go cur­rent­ly has the mech­a­nisms in place for com­pa­nies to pur­chase car­bon cred­its.

Ali con­ced­ed that the mar­ket re­mains un­der­de­vel­oped.

“At the present mo­ment, we are not sure that there is, and we do not be­lieve that there is,” he said, adding that the com­pa­ny is en­gag­ing stake­hold­ers in­volved in de­vel­op­ing car­bon-cred­it sys­tems.

He stressed that car­bon fi­nanc­ing is crit­i­cal to the project’s vi­a­bil­i­ty.

“One hun­dred per cent, the car­bon fi­nanc­ing is im­per­a­tive to the run­ning of the fa­cil­i­ty,” Ali said.

The ini­tia­tive al­so faces lo­gis­ti­cal chal­lenges. Close the Loop does not cur­rent­ly have the ca­pac­i­ty to col­lect or­gan­ic waste di­rect­ly from gen­er­a­tors, and a large-scale food-waste col­lec­tion sys­tem is not yet op­er­a­tional.

Ali said broad­er col­lec­tion ef­forts would re­quire stronger part­ner­ships, in­clud­ing pos­si­ble in­te­gra­tion with ex­ist­ing gov­ern­ment waste-man­age­ment sys­tems.

The project has en­tered a 30-day con­sul­ta­tion pe­ri­od that ends on Oc­to­ber 22, dur­ing which Close the Loop will seek feed­back from gov­ern­ment agen­cies, busi­ness­es, farm­ers and res­i­dents.

While com­post­ing of­fers a prac­ti­cal so­lu­tion for re­duc­ing land­fill waste, the con­sul­ta­tion high­light­ed a broad­er chal­lenge: build­ing the fi­nanc­ing mech­a­nisms, col­lec­tion net­works and pub­lic-sec­tor part­ner­ships need­ed to di­vert sig­nif­i­cant vol­umes of or­gan­ic waste away from the coun­try’s dumps and in­to pro­duc­tive use.