ALL primary schools in Georgetown will be targeted to assist the Mayor and City Council (M&CC) with the major composting project that was announced earlier this month by the Ministry of Communities.
The M&CC will be converting compost waste to fertiliser – an investment valued at $28M that is expected to generate approximately $87M on an annual basis.
Thus, before the end of the year’s first quarter, the City Council will acquire one thousand waste receptacles to be placed at the various primary schools in an effort to have the waste generated there separated.

“We can take the organic waste and teach them [the students] how to do composting at the school level. Hopefully this will help them to take the information home and do the same thing there,” M&CC Solid Waste Management Director Walter Narine told Chronicle.
According to Narine, the Council has already approved the project and so it is only now a matter of procuring the requisite equipment so that it can be rolled out by June 1.
“It will take some amount of collaboration with the residents around there; the farmers through the Ministry of Agriculture for them to buy the fertiliser from us. It will be a very cheap cost,” he related.

Narine observed that the ancient method now being pursued by M&CC is environmentally-friendly and one that will create a lot more space at the landfill site. “So it’s only fitting that Guyana should go towards this now,” he offered.
Meanwhile, Narine had earlier said that during the initial phase of the project, the Council will target only the Stabroek and Bourda Markets.

“When we would have examined the two markets, we realised that they generate on a daily basis, 25 metric tonnes of food waste. These are perishable cash crops which were not sold and the vendors would have discarded and tossed them out,” he explained.
He noted that these are the types of waste that reach the landfill on a daily basis, so the intention is to take 25 tonnes of waste and convert it into municipal compost.
Narine revealed that the compost would then be marketed as manure or fertiliser at a minimal cost to the National Agricultural Research and Extension Institute (NAREI), which is one of the primary targets, as well as to cash-crop farmers.

Guyana has been experiencing a plethora of issues in terms of entering the export market with cash crops, one of the reasons being the standard requirement by international trade for crops to be free from pesticides.
“So, if we can utilise the compost, it will benefit the farmers greatly who have aspirations of doing business on the export market,” Narine posited.