Orange Walk Turns Daily Kitchen Waste into Climate Action

Orange Walk is taking its garbage problem head-on and it’s starting in residents’ kitchens. Instead of piling up at the landfill, food scraps are now being turned into something useful. The town has rolled out its first-ever Home Composting Program, encouraging families to transform everyday kitchen waste into compost. So far, fifty households have already signed up, getting hands-on training and the tools to make it work. It’s a small shift with big impact. The initiative aims to cut down on household waste while reducing methane emissions that fuel climate change. The program officially launched over the weekend, alongside the introduction of a new woodchipper, another step in the town’s push toward greener, more sustainable waste management.

 

Joyce Castillo, Councilor, Orange Walk Town Council

“We are aware that out of all the garbage that we produce thirty-two percent of that garbage is organic waste. And that just goes to the dump site that we hav because we don’t have the transfer station as yet operational, so it’s just a dump site. And right there it turns into methane, and this is a greenhouse gas, which is eighty times stronger than CO2. It’s more potent than CO2. So we have to see how to divert that organic waste are going to the dump site. And when the transfer station actually becomes operational, hopefully this year, that they will not be receiving branches, the yard waste. They will not receive that there at the transfer station, so we have to see what we would be doing. So this recycle organics program came handy for us, beneficial for the Orange Walk Town Council, and we’ve learned so much from the other countries, the other municipalities, what they have been doing. And with the plan that we’ve got, we also last week received a chipper machine from the program. So we would like to thank them for receiving a chipper. It was the Benque municipality and the Orange Walk town that received this chipper, and now all our yard waste branches, because we have a lot of that we were just dumping it, and now we will be doing chippings. So they will get chipped, shredded, and then we have signed a memorandum agreement with the BSI factory. So they are already doing their composting. We don’t have a composting plant here at the municipality, but they’re already doing their composting, and we needed a so a plan, what will we be doing with these chippings in order to receive this chipper machine. So we signed a memorandum of agreement with the BSI ASR, and they will be receiving our chippings, and they will be adding that to their composting.”

 

The effort falls under the Recycle Organics Program, a global push to cut methane by turning food scraps and green waste into nutrient-rich compost.

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

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