In other environmental news, a Data Plastic pollution report conducted by OCEANA found that "Belize's daily plastic waste generation per person was 0.17 kilograms in 2010." Despite GOB's attempts to phase out single use plastics over the past few years, The Minister of sustainable development says that they have faced several challenges, mainly that the imports of a number of plastic materials still do not comply with the standards that have been set. The minister explained what they are doing to try and address this.
Orlando Habet, Minister of Sustainable Development
"The plastic pollution is coming back to the cabinet. We have been doing some improvements and amendments. Recall that we have passed the plastic regulations and we did an assessment two years later. All indications are that we have to strengthen it because we are still having imports of, plastic material that do not comply with the standards that have been set. So that has to be revamped and looked at how we can strengthen that, but the main thing now is that Belize, the Department of Environment now has the equipment to do the testing, which we didn't have before, but it would be unfair in a way or biased in a way. If the department who is the regulator does the test to see if you are compliant. So what we did was we got the same equipment for the University of Belize. So University of Belize, we will be doing the testing as a third party so it shows no bias."
