Community, Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz recycling center opens in February and will provide weekly service

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Residents of every district of Santa Cruz will now have a weekly recycling service available, according to the municipal coordinator of environmental services for the canton, Hazel Gutierrez.

This year, they plan to use two freight trucks to provide the service to businesses and residential houses.

Residents of Santa Cruz should keep in mind that the trucks won’t be collecting materials such as flat glass (like the kind used in windows), fluorescent lights, electronic equipment, egg cartons, pizza boxes, glassware or broken glass.

The materials that are recyclable must be clean, dry, have labels removed and separated. Only glass can still have labels.

The municipality will post each community’s collection days on its social networks, as well as clarifying information about the quality of the materials, requirements and classification.

Anyone who wants to request the service can do so at the number 8880-5901. Through this number, they can indicate what type of material they have, if they generate large quantities such as restaurants or hotels, or if they are residential houses,” Gutierrez added.

Previously, the canton of Santa Cruz’s recycling was handled by the Nicoya Recoverable Waste Recovery Center while the municipality worked on its own center.

New Recycling Collection Center

The center will be inaugurated on February 12 and was built inside the Environmental Technology Park. The El Cacao and the Bernabela ADIs will manage the center since they are the project’s neighboring communities.

Will have plastic and cardboard compacting machines that the municipality obtained on loan from business partners. These machines will allow them to deliver the recyclable material in a more finished form. These partners trained 10 people from neighboring communities in how to prepare and treat the materials.

Centro de Acopio Santa Cruz Parque Tecnologico Ambiental 2

Members of the Bernabela and El Cacao ADIs received training from the business partners who will be buying the recycled material. They are the ones who will classify and process recyclable material such as glass, paper and plastic. Credits: Courtesy of the Municipality of Santa Cruz

According to Gutierrez, the collection center cost ¢202 million (about $340,000) and was built with funds from the Rural Development Institute (INDER).

“There are no experiences in Guanacaste of a recovery center for recoverable waste designed for this purpose. We are, without fear of being wrong, the only ones who have designed the recovery center to function as such. It wasn’t a warehouse that was taken over to do this,” she explained.

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