New landfill plan considered after latest dump inferno

At a glance

* Minister promises lined landfill but construction not funded till 2028

* Hew warns long-term fix a long way off

* Expert warning over methane build-up and fire risk

Government has outlined plans to create a new lined landfill at the existing George Town site until a sustainable solution can be developed for one of Cayman’s longest running issues.

Minister Katherine Ebanks-Wilks said Friday that the coalition believes there is sufficient room at the current site to create a safer, more sustainable means of disposing of trash.

Combined with investment in recycling and composting infrastructure, she suggested this could give government another decade to come up with a longer-term plan to a problem that has plagued Cayman for more than 30 years.

She was speaking after another major fire ripped through the dump last week, closing roads and schools and creating smoke plumes that were visible to arriving tourists on planes and cruise ships.

The blaze raged for 24 hours and required 50 firefighters working round the clock to bring under control.

It was at least the 8th occasion in the past two decades that a major landfill inferno has made the front page of the Compass.

The fire was the third in the space of a month and has put new focus on the long acknowledged environmental and safety hazard of the current waste management operation.

Ebanks-Wilks told the Compass, “Solving the long-running issue of waste management is a commitment the NCFC government has made and will deliver on.

“In the mid-term, our plan is to improve landfill operations by transitioning to a more sustainable facility at the existing location and remediating the current site.

“With $6 million allocated in our capex budget, alongside expanded recycling and waste diversion programmes, this new, fully lined landfill will have capacity for a decade.”

She added that while the interim strategy was implemented, government would begin developing a long-term waste management system delivering “a practical and cost-effective solution for the following decades”.

No construction funding till next budget

The ministry clarified that the $6 million in the current capital budget covers immediate infrastructure needs including the replacement medical waste incinerator, a compactor for Cayman Brac and equipment upgrades.

Separate funding of just over $2 million has been allocated for the scoping and business case work required to advance the lined landfill and recycling and composting facilities.

Construction funding will not be sought for the landfill project until the 2028/29 budget cycle, though a green waste facility could commence sooner.

A separate business case process will also be required for the longer-term solution to replace the landfill entirely. The ministry said a Strategic Outline Case for that long-term solution was part of the phased plan but gave no timeline for its completion.

The previous coalition government, under the leadership of Juliana O’Connor-Connolly, now on the opposition benches with the PPM, cancelled stalled negotiations with a Dart-led consortium over a suite of new infrastructure, including a waste-to-energy plant, recycling facilities and a smaller lined landfill.

That project was first agreed in 2017 but it took seven years to negotiate the details and government eventually concluded it had become unaffordable.

Speaking in Finance Committee after the budget presentation late last year, Ebanks-Wilks indicated government would need to go back to the drawing board on a long-term solution.

She highlighted recycling and composting as an essential means of prolonging the life of the existing site, in effect, to buy time for that process.

Citing weighbridge data from the George Town landfill, she said 124,125 tons of trash had gone into the site in 2024, far exceeding the worst-case projections of 80,000 tons when the project was scoped a decade ago.

‘We don’t even have the beginning of a solution’

Opposition leader Joey Hew, who represents George Town North and whose constituency borders the landfill, said the fire had exposed the lack of a credible plan.

“There is absolutely zero in the budget for anything to be done about the landfill over the next two years,” he told the Compass.

“There’s no money in the budget, no future plans. We haven’t heard any further statements as to how we intend to deal with it in the long term. This is pretty serious.”

On recycling, he said government had neither the equipment nor the infrastructure to deliver on its stated ambitions and had not outlined a budget or a clear plan to introduce curbside collections or otherwise divert more waste from landfill.

He also questioned government’s decision to scrap the ReGen project without an alternative in mind and argued that the costs had been misrepresented and exaggerated.

“I think they didn’t give it a chance,” he said.

“They didn’t even look at trying to reduce the scope of it. They just killed the whole thing without any other solution. Now we don’t have a solution. We don’t even have the beginning of a solution.”

Ebanks-Wilks pushed back on that characterisation.

She said a recycling technical working group had been formed and is developing plans to reduce the volume of waste reaching the landfill, focusing on green waste recyclable materials including glass, metal and paper, and household waste. At least one new project, likely a green waste facility, could begin within this budget cycle.

“Waste diversion is core to our plans for improving waste management and extending the lifespan of the George Town landfill,” she added.

Decades and dollars spent on abandoned plans

Tens of millions of dollars have been spent over more than a decade pursuing and then abandoning plans. Hew estimated up to $20 million had been spent planning and negotiating the solid waste management strategy and ReGen project before the costs of capping the old landfill mounds were considered.

And he suggested those costs could increase as government seeks to terminate the contract and cover any litigation fees associated with the cancelled project.

Any new solution, once it is scoped and goes through the business case process, is likely to be far more expensive, simply because of inflation, he added.

“Anything you do now is going to be double the cost of what it was 13 years ago,” Hew said.

He acknowledged the PPM had been unable to get the project complete in eight years at the helm but insisted: “We started it. We got further than anybody else, and now they’ve had a year and we have zero.”

Past plans and pitfalls

Hew’s People’s Progressives Movement came to power in 2013 under then Premier Sir Alden McLaughlin after sweeping all four Bodden Town seats, partially on the back of their opposition to a different government plan to fix the landfill.

At that time, the United Democratic Party, under the leadership of McKeeva Bush up to his ousting in December 2012, had advanced a plan to put a new lined landfill in Breakers.

That met with significant local opposition and the Progressives scrapped it and scoped a new national solid waste management strategy that ultimately led to the ReGen contract.

But that deal was still not fully finalised when the party lost government in 2021 and the project was eventually scrapped.

Former Department of Environmental Health director Walling Whittaker has been watching this problem long enough to remember the first serious attempt to find a new site for the landfill in the early 1990s.

He spent more than two decades at the George Town site, returning from university in 1987 and later serving as director before establishing his own environmental engineering consultancy.

“We were doing public consultations and there was a big uproar – ‘we don’t want it anywhere near our area’. And then we had a change in government and the whole plan went cold after that.”

He said the pattern had repeated itself ever since – new plans, community resistance, election cycles and starting again from scratch.

“We’ve been too ambitious. Rather than simplifying it and going for something that is simple, proven and sustainable, we tend to opt for gold-plated solutions.”

He said the best plan now would be to strip back the ambition, agree a viable site and build new facilities incrementally, starting with a properly engineered lined landfill that could include modern fire prevention methodology and technology.

‘What we have is a dump’

He said the new active fill area, which faces the Esterley Tibbetts Highway and was the section burning Thursday, lacked basic infrastructure that the older mounds had in place.

“There are no gas extraction wells in there,” he claimed. “They have yet to install extraction wells and connect it to the existing network.”

Whittaker said most modern landfills have a honeycomb-style structure with vertical and horizontal fire breaks. He said that does not exist at the current site.

The Department of Environmental Health has indicated that it does compact and cover sections of the open fill site and Ebanks-Wilks said in her statement that this would increase.

“I have authorised the team to take additional preventative measures by increasing the frequency with which they cover landfill waste with aggregate as part of ongoing operations,” she said.

Whittaker suggested the limited space at the current site has meant fire breaks have not been a priority.

“They’re trying to shoehorn as much garbage as possible into a tight, small space.”

He said lithium-ion batteries from discarded laptops, vapes, phones and other devices improperly placed in household waste were the most likely ignition source, consistent with a global increase in landfill fires.

“All it takes is a small spark, and we’ve ignited everything,” he said. “And then when you add to that the fact that the new area has a lot of fresh methane gas being generated, you have this type of scenario.”

“We need to have a proper hazardous waste recycling programme that strips out these items from the waste stream. We cannot allow those items to get disposed of by landfilling.”

Right now, he said Cayman’s infrastructure is decades behind.

“What we have is a dump. Let’s start calling it a dump. A landfill is an engineered system. What we have is a dump.”