Belize Moves to Strengthen Plastic Ban After Compliance Issues

Three years after enforcement began under the 2022 Environmental Protection (Pollution from Plastic) Regulations, the Government of Belize is looking to strengthen the legislation. The regulations made it an offense to possess single-use plastic products that don’t meet Belize’s biodegradable standards. The government rolled out enforcement in a phased approach, giving importers and wholesalers time to sell their old stock and replenish their inventories with products that meet the standards.  The Ministry of Sustainable Development, Climate Change & Disaster Risk Management says that compliance has been an issue. According to Minister Orlando Habet, as part of the upcoming changes, compliance testing will be taken from the Department of the Environment and given to a third party.

Orlando Habet, Minister of Sustainable Development: “The plastic pollution is coming back to 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 and 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 look 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 complying. So what we did was we got the same equipment for the University of Belize.  So University of Belize will be doing the testing as a third party so that it shows no bias.”

The NGO community has also pledged its support for the strengthening of the legislation. NGO Senator Janelle Chanona told Love News that a key consideration needs to be incentivizing the use of recyclables.

Janelle Chanona, NGO Senator: “Well, first of all, we thoroughly support strengthening the law to make sure that plastic as I would say an insidious plague on our resources, our water, our rivers, our sea, our terrestrial beauty aesthetic-wise and in terms of implications in other ways we certainly support looking at making sure we’re meaningfully addressing it where we need to. I think we have NGOs like Humana Belize and many others who are trying to bring out that litter today means something very damaging tomorrow. And we’re also looking at how do we make sure that the legislation in place is strengthened in making sure that there’s some type of returnable value or some incentive for persons not to throw it on the street. Part of that will be a cultural mindset change in terms of somebody “else’s job is to pick it up” or you know “it’s only one bottle it won’t hurt.” but really making sure that we appreciate as a society all of us have a role to play. But from a legislative point of view certainly looking at how do we stop the, how do we turn off the production of virgin plastic and making sure that we’re reusing, we’re reducing, we’re recycling,  but more than anything that we’re not contributing to adding more plastic in the environment.”

The Ministry has not yet established a timeline for meetings on the legislation’s improvement.