ENVIRONMENT-CUBA: Recycling Provides 250,000 Jobs

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Oct 3 1996 (IPS) - Recycling is a major enterprise in Cuba, providing some 250,000 jobs and saving the country roughly 100 million dollars a year on imports, officials say. But they believe much more could be done.

The 14 firms that make up a union of recycling companies supply some 16,000 tonnes of scrap metal a month to an industrial processing plant. Three thousand workers are involved in that process and savings of close to 1.6 million dollars in imports are achieved with the international price of steel at around 100 dollars per tonne.

Aluminum — priced at 1,700 to 1,850 dollars a tonne — is recycled to produce shapes for doors and windows, furniture, pistons for motors, household utensils, toothpaste tubes and medicine containers.

According to the weekly ‘Juventud Rebelde’, official publication of the Young Communists’ Union, a standard-sized window frame can be made from 500 recycled soda or beer cans, and the aluminum used in building an entire health clinic can be produced from one tonne.

Some 1,800 bags can be made from a tonne of recycled plastic, which obviates the need to use the 18.7 tonnes of oil needed to produce the corresponding amount of plastic resin.

“We have to return all recoverable material to national industry,” the director of the union of recycling companies in Havana, Agustin Santiago Seijas, told the TV channel CHTV. Every workplace should have a recycling system, he added.

One fast-food cafe in Havana sells some 200 canned beverages a day. But the stamp reading “returnable” is usually ignored by consumers, who simply throw them away, or dump them in the street.

The tourism sector contributed more than 230,000 dollars to the economy in the first half of the year by providing 135 tonnes of aluminum and 50 tonnes of plastic for recycling, according to official reports.

But Seijas underlined that few hotel and business managers will hold onto the recyclable materials if they are not picked up on a daily basis.

“Many throw it away if we don’t pick it up on time every day. Then we have to get the Office of Communal Services to collect the materials and sell them to us,” he added.

The recycling of paper and cardboard is also important in terms of environmental conservation, for reducing energy consumption and for manufacturing products that have been scarce since the economic crisis broke out in 1990.

“If we recycle 1.2 tonnes of paper and cardboard, 17 10-year- old trees can be saved, and 65 percent of the oil and 85 of the water needed to produce it can be saved,” said Rafael Ramirez, who represents a Havana paper company.

1.2 tonnes of reprocessed paper and cardboard can be used to produce 25,000 school notebooks, 2,480 400-page books or 13,800 egg cartons.

“We have the capacity to process up to 3,000 tonnes of paper a month, but we only recover some 1,000 tonnes,” said Abelardo Sanchez, the director of a Havana processing plant.

Officials say much more needs to be done.

Although the Committees in Defence of the Revolution, grassroots neighbourhood organisations, have collected recyclable materials for over 30 years, a culture of recycling has not yet taken root in the population.

“For many years we were used to a sure source of resources sent by our old socialist friends, and we greatly underestimated recycling possibilities,” said Rafael Garrido, a recycling worker.

But although around 80,000 people make a living from collecting recyclable materials in Havana alone, some say it is hardly worth the effort.

“They pay you a mere pittance when you bring anything in, and life is too difficult to be lugging things around for nothing,” said Emilio Garcia, a Havana resident who for years scraped up extra income by collecting recyclable materials.

The government collection plants pay 1.5 Cuban pesos for a bag full of cans, and .20 cents for a litre-sized container (the dollar is currently worth 18 pesos, and the average Cuban salary is 200 pesos).

“What they pay for the raw materials is discouraging. Besides, when you get there after hauling in the cans, no one is there, or they tell you the money has run out.”