The Bahamas, known officially as the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, is a country within the Lucayan Archipelago of the West Indies in the Atlantic. It takes up 97% of the Lucayan Archipelago’s land area and is home to 88% of the archipelago’s population. The archipelagic state consists of more than 700 islands, cays, and islets in the Atlantic Ocean, and is located north of Cuba and northwest of the island of Hispaniola (split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and the Turks and Caicos Islands, southeast of the US state of Florida, and east of the Florida Keys. The capital is Nassau on the island of New Providence. The Bahamas’ territory as encompasses 470,000 km2 of ocean space.
The Bahamas were inhabited by the Lucayans, a branch of the Arawakan-speaking Taíno people, for many centuries. Columbus was the first European to see the islands, making his first landfall in the ‘New World’ in 1492. Later, the Spanish shipped the native Lucayans to and enslaved them on Hispaniola, after which the Bahama islands were mostly deserted from 1513 until 1648, when English colonists from Bermuda settled on the island of Eleuthera. The country gained governmental independence in 1973 In terms of gross domestic product per capita, The Bahamas is one of the richest countries in the Americas (following the United States and Canada), with an economy based on tourism and offshore finance.
The disposal of rubbish in and around the Caribbean islands has been a cause for concern for some time now. With land at a premium, landfills are not a viable solution for managing waste, either from an ecological or financial perspective. As images emerged of a huge plastic mass floating off of the Honduran island of Roatan in 2017, attention turned to the ways in which the Caribbean islands were managing the issue of waste.
With the tourism industry accounting for more than 60 % of the country’s gross domestic product, keeping the beaches and national parks clean and free from waste is a number one priority for the Bahamas. Currently, it produces 300,000 tons of garbage every year, which is subsequently dumped into local landfills that are extremely expensive to maintain. Not to mention the fact that these landfills are using valuable land, which is hard to come by on these tiny islands.
In an effort to manage the issue of waste, the Bahamas Plastic Movement has been set up to recycle as much waste as possible while also educating the tourist industry. With so many places for tourists to stay when they visit, tackling the problem by approaching hotels and resorts is the only way to ensure that policies are also adhered to by visitors.
WOIMA has the perfect solution to support the Bahamas Plastics Movement to improve the solid waste management on the island. We have developed a modular wasteWOIMA® waste-to-energy power plant that is prefabricated into standard containers and thus easy and fast to deliver anywhere in the world. It recycles the waste into raw materials and energy in the most efficient manner reducing the waste quantity by over 95%. And if requirements change over time, the power plant can be dismantled and relocated elsewhere leaving just the concrete base slab behind.
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WOIMA Corporation is a Finnish supplier of best-in-class waste-to-value products, projects and services worldwide. We have developed solutions that enable us, and the customer, to transform and recycle virtually any waste stream into raw materials and energy. At WOIMA we combine Finnish engineering know-how in waste management with power generation design expertise. These solutions are used in Finland every day. They support the circular economy ideology and ensure that less than 1% of Finland’s waste ends up in landfills.
Our mission is to improve quality of life both locally and globally, as well as empower people to utilize waste as a commodity. Our decades of international project management experience ensure an on-time, in-budget and high-quality WOIMA solution delivery across the globe.
