Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Bonaire’s STINAPA Spearheads Campaign to Get Back to Tap Water
On Bonaire, where water is made through a salt water desalination process, you can safely drink from the faucet. The water tastes great and is refreshing. Yet each day, thousands of bottles of water are used and then the plastic bottles are casually discarded.
Many people don’t think about how that extra garbage is being handled, but these hundreds of thousands of plastic bottles are dumped in Bonaire’s landfill (which is very close to its maximum capacity), where they can take up to 700 years to disintegrate. Bonaire, being a small island, doesn’t yet have facilities for recycling plastic bottles.
Since 2008 has been designated as the International Year of the Reef (IYOR 2008), STINAPA and the Bonaire National Marine Park want to motivate people to drink tap water when on Bonaire, instead of buying bottled water. Selibon N.V., the sanitation company managing the landfill, does not yet have an alternate way to process our waste. While they are searching for a solution they can afford, we (residents and tourists alike) all have an obligation to reduce the pressure on the landfill by simply reducing the waste we produce. One way to do this is to stop buying bottled water and begin drinking from the tap instead. Visitors, who are “on the road” diving or sightseeing, are urged to re-use empty plastic bottles and re-fill them with tap water. (Source: STINAPA)
