Your Islands.
Cleaner. Richer. Better.

Yes — one collection, everything in. Mixed food scraps, packaging, electronics, batteries, clothing, furniture, garden material — all accepted in the same collection. The factory does the sorting. You don't. There is no wrong bin under this system. The manufacturing facility is designed to accept everything your household generates without any pre-sorting requirement.

Better — not worse. The smell that currently comes from George Town when the wind is right comes from the landfill. The manufacturing facility that replaces it is fully enclosed, with airlocked entry points for collection vehicles. It is designed to have near-zero atmospheric discharge — meaning almost no smell and no visible emissions. The primary source of landfill odour on Grand Cayman is the very thing being eliminated.

Two ways. First, directly: the government pays a manufacturing service fee per tonne delivered to the factory — at a lower rate than the cost of continuing with the landfill system. Second, and more significantly: the government receives a royalty back from Carbotura beginning about 13 months after the factory opens. Over 30 years, that royalty is designed to total approximately $354 million paid to the Cayman Islands — money that can flow into public services, reduce rates, or be invested in the island. Today, every dollar spent on disposal returns zero. This changes that.

All of them — one collection. Old mobile phones, laptop computers, batteries of any type, small appliances, fluorescent bulbs — all accepted in the regular collection. There is no separate drop-off required. No special bags or labelling. The manufacturing process is designed to handle all of these material types through the same system. The high-temperature molecular process handles items that conventional recycling cannot. Put it all out and the factory handles it.

This is fundamentally different from incineration — and the difference matters.

Incineration burns material with oxygen and a flame. It destroys the material and produces ash, carbon dioxide, and air emissions. What comes out is waste. The material is gone.

Advanced Circular Manufacturing uses microwave energy in an oxygen-free chamber — there is no flame, no burning, and no combustion. Instead, the process breaks the molecular bonds in the material and reforms them into new manufactured products: graphite for batteries, hydrogen for fuel, metals, and clean water. What comes out is not waste — it is product.

The simplest way to understand it: incineration destroys material. This process manufactures from it. The factory in George Town would be classified as a manufacturing facility under international industry codes — the same category as a graphite plant or a chemical manufacturer — not as a disposal facility.

The plan addresses both the existing mound and the ongoing flow of new material. Once the factory opens, new material stops going to the landfill — it goes to the factory instead. Over time, the historical material in the mound itself is gradually extracted and processed through the factory. This is called the Exogenesis Protocol — essentially, urban mining of the historical landfill. The 40-acre, 90-foot mound that has been accumulating since the 1960s gets cleared over the expanded programme phases. The leachate risk to the North Sound disappears with it.

The Sister Islands are included in the longer-term programme. The Cayman Brac landfill and the Little Cayman facility — where material is currently burned in the open — are both addressed as the programme expands. Material from the Sister Islands would be consolidated and transported to the Grand Cayman factory in later phases. Open burning on Little Cayman, which is environmentally non-compliant, ends as part of this programme.