As workers loaded trash on Monday behind the incinerator building in Pockwood Pond, Waste Management Director Marcus Solomon pointed up to a wooded area on the nearby hillside. The site, he said, will be included in a landfill expansion to be designed soon with funding from part of a $1.5 million capital allocation his department received in this year’s budget.
The tender for the design will probably be advertised by the end of the year, according to the director, who added that the allocation will also fund new vehicles and related works including re-cutting and expanding the road leading through the dump.
The dumpsite redesign — which Mr. Solomon hopes will soon be complemented by the long-delayed repair of the inoperable trash incinerator — is an early step toward implementing a comprehensive waste management strategy developed by Swiss firm Agency RED in 2019.
The 2019 strategy, which would cost tens of millions of dollars to implement in full, would dramatically overhaul and modernise the way the territory handles solid waste. But its recommendations were initially delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic, and since then they have mostly stalled due to funding shortfalls and other obstacles.
Design tender
On Monday, the DWM director stood at the base of the dumpsite and explained the upcoming tender for the redesign.
“The initial tender package will come out to do design work, so the public and [the DWM] will have an idea of how the dumpsite is going to look for the next three years,” Mr. Solomon said. “Coming out of the design works will then be the construction of it.”
The design, he added, will help answer questions about the expansion’s costs, footprint and other specifications.
“Out of the design, we’ll have the whole bill of quantities; we’ll have the whole layout; we’ll know what type of road — if it’s an asphalt or concrete road,” Mr. Solomon said, adding, “We want to have drainage this time as well. So all those things are going to be part of the whole design.”
After a “best approach” is decided, a separate tender will be launched for the actual reconstruction and expansion of the dump, according to the director.
“We felt we should break [the project] up in parts,” he said. “So we’ll do the redesign first, approve the design, and then go back out to construct once we have agreed on how the design is going to look.”
‘Controlled,’ not ‘engineered’
Mr. Solomon said the redesigned facility will meet the criteria to be considered a “controlled” landfill, which means it would pose fewer environmental and health risks than its current configuration, which is closer to an “open dump.”
But even after the planned expansion, the dump is not expected to meet the requirements of an “engineered” dumpsite, according to Mr. Solomon.
“We didn’t go out to seek to have an engineered dumpsite done,” he explained. “That is a more long-term plan that we intend to announce soon to the public in terms of a sanitary engineered landfill.”
Mr. Solomon acknowledged that the current expansion plan is limited in scope, explaining that the initial redesign is a first step in “remedying past problems.”
Incinerator
The dump has faced massive additional burdens in recent years because of problems at the incinerator that is supposed to burn the great majority of the territory’s trash. After a fire knocked the incinerator offline in February 2022, most of Tortola’s garbage has been buried in the dumpsite, which frequently catches fire and sends noxious smoke over Tortola’s western end.
Despite the dire situation — which is not a first — incinerator repairs have been delayed repeatedly as the government negotiates with Consutech Systems LLC, the Virginia-based company that manufactured the incinerator and supplies the needed replacement parts.
Shortly after the 2022 fire, then-Health and Social Development Minister Carvin Malone said the facility would be repaired within two to four months. In March 2022, two to four months became six. Four months later, at a House of Assembly meeting, Mr. Malone’s successor Marlon Penn said he expected the incinerator to be repaired by the end of 2022.
During that HOA meeting, Mr. Penn also explained that Consutech had been contracted to supply a replacement quench tank and ash conveyor, a heat exchanger, and three transfer arms.
Last October, the three transfer arms were delivered to the dumpsite, but because of the scope of the needed repairs, restorative works could not begin until the rest of the needed equipment arrived, Mr. Solomon said the following month.
Final pieces
Mr. Solomon provided an update Monday, saying that the final pieces of the ash conveyor and the control panel are still needed from Consutech.
The parts for the ash conveyor are currently ready for shipping, he added.
“So you have the shipping fees that we have to pay to bring this [ash conveyor] part in,” Mr. Solomon explained. “So that will close up the contract related to the quench tank and the ash conveyor.”
However, repairs to the incinerator’s control panel have been further delayed because of Consutech Systems’ suppliers, the director said.
“We have written [Consutech about] getting updates. They did provide photographic evidence of the control panel being at 90 percent, but that has been for quite some time,” Mr. Solomon said. “So a written warning was sent, and [Consutech] communicated that they were having challenges with one of their suppliers and that they had outsourced the heat exchanger.”
According to the director, a third request was sent for an update from the “third supplier,” to ensure that it “can fulfill their obligations.” The third notice also “advised” those suppliers as to the VI’s “next steps if those things are not forthcoming,” he said.
Of the five outstanding contracts with Consutech, Mr. Solomon said, three will be closed following the delivery of the final quench tank parts. The contract for the transfer arms has been closed since October 2023, while the quench tank and ash conveyor contracts should be completed in about a month’s time, according to the director.
Scrubber
Also outstanding from an earlier contract is a pollution control scrubber for the incinerator that was never installed.
In 2015, government signed a roughly $1 million contract with Consutech to manufacture the scrubber, and it has already paid the company at least $500,000, government officials have said.
This week, Mr. Solomon said he will worry about the scrubber after getting the incinerator functional again.
“The approach was to first get the parts in full, see if this thing could work or not work, and then have a discussion related to the scrubber,” he explained.
2019 strategy
Once a fully functional incinerator is operating in conjunction with a “controlled” dumpsite, Mr. Solomon feels the department will be back on track toward carrying out the early steps outlined in the waste management strategy proposed by Agency RED in 2019.
“Since assuming the office, I’ve been working with the RED plan to execute in measurable pieces,” Mr. Solomon said. “That’s a consistent approach using the RED plan as a whole diagram.”
But the 2019 strategy also includes other far-reaching measures: an extensive sorting facility for trash; robust recycling programmes; comprehensive legislative reforms; properly constructed landfills; a better system for handling derelict vehicles and boats; large-scale composting; door-to-door trash pickup; a new state-of-the-art incinerator, and many others.
Though the strategy doesn’t predict the cost of this vision, many of its proposals echo a more modest 2013 strategy that estimated a total price tag of nearly $20 million over six years.
Mr. Solomon has declined to comment on the cost of fully implementing the 2019 strategy, though he argued that funding such pursuits has wide-ranging benefits.
“If we put forward sufficient revenue instruments, … it will create jobs,” Mr. Solomon said. “It will create sustainable jobs. It will create new industry as well.”
Legislative reforms
Among the proposed legislative reforms, the strategy recommends a new Waste Management Act that would transition the DWM into a statutory body overseen by a board.
In January, Health and Social Development Minister Vincent Wheatley blamed this provision for delaying the implementation of the 2019 strategy.
“It has never been implemented, and it’s because of one reason,” Mr. Wheatley said at the time. “In the waste management strategy, it calls for [the DWM] going statutory.”
After that hurdle is addressed, Mr. Wheatley claimed, the strategy will be officially approved and implementation will begin.
Some related progress came during a May 8 Cabinet meeting, when the Cabinet “received and reviewed the National Waste Management Strategy” before deciding that the Ministry of Health and Social Development should “consider a phased approach” to the strategy’s priorities, according to a summary of the meeting provided by the Cabinet Office.
That effort, Cabinet decided, should include creating a Waste Management Act for Cabinet’s consideration.
New vehicles
To complement the landfill redesign, three new vehicles will also be purchased using the capital funding DWM received this year, according to Mr. Solomon.
“[The machines] will allow us to have the appropriate equipment, both for [Virgin Gorda] and Tortola, to be able to compact and be able to do excavation work related to landfill management,” Mr. Solomon explained, adding, “[It] will be first time the BVI is having a landfill compactor [if] we are successful in getting the tender for it.”
In the meantime, he said, the department uses other equipment to compact the landfill daily — a job that can be particularly challenging during times of inclement weather.
But Clifton Bryan, a shift supervisor at Pockwood Pond, said teamwork is a key element of workers’ success.
“We have a team that works very hard and diligently,” Mr. Bryan told the Beacon on Monday. “We’ve gone through a storm already, and [Ernesto] wasn’t as bad as the previous storm. We get [things] under control with teamwork.”
