An international delegation dropped by St. Albert last weekend to help a town in Nicaragua make money through recycling.
Representatives from Somoto, Nicaragua, and Athabasca County toured the Enjoy Centre in St. Albert Saturday as part of an international exchange program. The visit is part of a three-year partnership to bring business development to Nicaragua, one organized by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) and backed by the federal government.
Nicaragua is a very poor nation with high levels of environmental awareness, says Ron Jackson, Athabasca County's director of agriculture and emergency services. The county and Somoto are working on a plan that would support the town's efforts to turn waste paper into briquettes, reducing deforestation and raising money.
Speaking through a translator, Somoto vice-mayor Blanca Nubia Aranz says she hopes to bring some of Alberta's recycling expertise back to Nicaragua.
"We say garbage is a treasure because you can find many uses for it," she says. "We want to have a clean city to improve the health of our community."
This just goes to show how more and more groups are seeing the links between business and the environment, says Jim Hole, co-owner of the Enjoy Centre.
"If we want to be around here for the next hundred years, we've got to have these two [elements] working together."
Green exchange
Somoto is a town of about 5,000 in northwest Nicaragua, Jackson says. Town officials spent much of the last week touring Athabasca County and visiting places like the Edmonton Waste Management Centre.
Somoto doesn't get snow, so Alberta's white stuff was an interesting experience for Aranz.
"It's very cold," she says, after a bout of mock-shivers, "but beautiful. Seeing everything white is very beautiful."
The idea for the paper project came out of a visit to Somoto by county officials last summer, says FCM spokesperson Katherine Murillo. The visit was supposed to be about economic development, she says, but the number one topic ended up being waste.
Recycling is a pretty new idea in Nicaragua, says Jackson, who visited Somoto last summer with the county officials.
"The mentality right now is if you're unwrapping a tortilla, [you] throw the wrapper on the ground."
This encourages people to create trash heaps in the middle of neighbourhoods, says Murillo, and changing that mentality is a huge challenge. Most communities don't have the funds needed for regular trash collection; so waste piles onto these illegal dumps, creating ugliness, health risks and occasional fires.
Somoto has a lot of paper waste and no way to market it, Jackson says. At the same time, it's using a lot of wood to cook its food, which costs money and encourages deforestation.
They're still working out the details, but Jackson says the plan is to have Athabasca County help Somoto start turning its waste paper into cheap fuel for cooking.
Global warming is a big risk to Nicaragua, Aranz says, which is already feeling its effects in the form of droughts and floods.
"We have a lack of water, and a lot of people who used to farm don't anymore because they can't get the water."
This briquette program will help the town do its part to protect the environment and oppose global warming, she says.
On the flip side, Nicaragua has a lot to teach Alberta, Jackson notes, especially when it comes to gender equality. Many of its business and political organizations have equal numbers of male and female representatives. "Frankly, we aren't there yet."
The delegates will now finalize their development plan, Murillo says, and will likely hold another exchange next year.
