Garden City Gets New Garbage Bins for Plastic Bottles

The Child Advisory Body (CAB) has launched its new clean-up initiative.  Newly build petal-shaped garbage containers will be strategically placed around Belmopan city which will be for the sole purpose of collecting plastic bottles. Belmopan City Councillor, Pauline Soberanis and the Vice President of CAB, Nicola Stephens, say this initiative is geared at keeping the city clean and also providing medical treatment for children with cancer. After each collection of a thousand plastic bottles, they will be sent to a medical centre in Merida which in turn will provide a Belizean child with free chemotherapy.

Pauline Soberanis – Tillett, Belmopan City Councilor: “I went to Caye  Caulker and there I noticed that they had a similar idea with using a design of crayfish and I thought well Belmopan is the Garden City why don’t we bring this here and do it in petals or flowers? So when I came back I went straight to Mr. Arthurs and I talked to him about the idea and he said yes we can so of course because it’s a CAB thing I took it back to CAB members and asked them what they think and got their opinion at everything and it was at go and I would like to thank our donors which is World Wildlife Fund and also the Belmopan market plaza because once I talked to them about the idea they were quick to say yes let’s do it.” 

Kevan Arthurs, Engineering Manager, Belmopan City Council: “In this design our thing was to make a flower so I got on my computer, I designed it in AutoCAD so we looked at the shape of the petals and the design and the height and from that design I made this prototype. So basically it’s just mesh with 3/8ths steel and it’s welded together the shape the petals. And the idea of this is that it can trap bottles inside the center if you look over this side you can see the center of that and around the edges. Generally that’s the idea.” 

Nicola Stephens, Vice President, Child Advisory Body:  “We were talking about in a meeting and I believe it was I think Liyeisha and she was the vice president at the time she came to us with the idea because of her high school that she is going to was doing it and we thought it sounded really good especially for the fact that you always see people just throwing their garbage all over the place especially the plastic bottles so when she came to us to talk to us about it and then we brought it up with miss Pauline she said that it sounded like a great idea.”