Drop off old phone books until 20 November
If you have a pile of old phone
books taking up space in your house, you can take them to schools, stores and
other drop-off points in Cayman this month for recycling.
Old editions of Cayman Buzz and
Yellow Pages directories handed in by the public will be turned into insulation
for homes and offices.
The phone book drive continues
until 20 November.
The programme includes the
Yellow2Green School Challenge, in which all primary schools can compete to win
a pizza party and up to CI$1,500. The school that collects the most books, per
student body, wins.
The books will be shipped off
island by Thompson Shipping Line to Tampa, Florida, where they will be recycled
into GreenFiber insulation, an all-natural fibre insulation product.
Organisers said the three-week
campaign is designed to collect at least 50 per cent of the Island’s old phone
books, potentially keeping approximately 60 tons of waste from the local
landfill. If successful, it will be extended to the Sister Islands in 2011.
Only dry phone books will be
accepted because wet ones cannot be recycled.
Businesses that have large amounts
of books can drop off the directories at the Cayman Islands Chamber of
Commerce’s new Governors Square office.
Other drop-off points are: Camana
Bay; Foster’s Food Fair, Hurley’s and Kirk supermarkets; LIME stores in Grand
Cayman; and participating primary schools.
Phone books from all publishers
will be accepted in the drive. New phone books will be issued to the public in
the near future, with Cayman Buzz directories scheduled for delivery to homes
and offices in January 2011.
By working with community
organisations such as schools, libraries and businesses across North America to
collect newspapers, phone books, cardboard and papers, US GreenFiber has
diverted more than one million tons of paper from landfills and is now
expanding its efforts to Cayman.
“We are excited to expand our
Community Paper Recycling Programme to include the Cayman Islands, helping this
part of the Caribbean find a creative and ‘green’ way to save land use for the
Islands, its residents and guests,” said Dennis Barrineau, president of
GreenFiber, which is exploring opportunities to roll out similar recycling
initiatives throughout the Caribbean.
GreenFiber, based in North
Carolina, was launched several years ago, and its Community Paper Recycling
Programme is in most US cities that have manufacturing facilities. The
programme was expanded into the Caribbean region earlier this year when
GreenFiber partnered with Bahamas Telecommunications Company Ltd and Atlantis
Caribbean Line Ltd to keep used phone books out of the Bahama’s landfills and
recycle them.
Refuse efficiency experts state
that paper products account for 34 per cent of landfill space – enough office
and writing paper each year to build a wall 12 feet high from Los Angeles to
New York City.
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