Bacab Employees Launch Highway Cleanup

Can you name one thing you see along Belize’s highways that you’ll never see on any road in, say, neighbouring Chetumal? Give up? Well, we’ll tell you. It’s garbage. A lot of garbage…miles and miles of garbage thrown there from buses, cars, bicycles and even people walking by. It’s an eyesore, an embarrassment, and one company today had enough of seeing it. The Bacab Eco-resort is located on the Burrell Boom road and caters to a lot of tourists who need to be bussed in along the highway. They got tired of tourists complaining about the garbage, so they decided to clean it up. This morning News Five found employees of the popular resort getting down and dirty on the highway.

Yvonne Hunter, Organized Highway Cleanup

“We’ve been having this problem with the garbage. We notice it whenever we go up and down because the tourist buses are very high up. You can get a full view of all the garbage on the highway. We’ve been talking about it and we decided that we have to put it in action because we get comment cards back from the tourists that Belize is such a beautiful country, the people are amazing but the garbage just null and voids everything that we are trying so hard to achieve. We all work at Bacab. You know, anybody that’s been to Bacab knows that it’s kept clean. We try our hardest to keep it clean. This came up on Friday so we didn’t have much notice, much time, but the majority of the staff is here. We have at least six groups of four or five people each, so that’s quite an amount of people. They gave up their Mondays which is usually their day off, to come in and clean up the area. It’s important.”

Yvonne Hunter

Reporter

“The sad reality is that you all will clean this today and by tomorrow…so what message would you like to send to Belizeans, because it is Belizeans going this?”

Yvonne Hunter

“More people need to get involved in cleaning up. A lot of the garbage, when I’m riding the buses, I see a lot of the garbage – it’s not that people physically throw it out of the bus, they throw it inside the bus and it blows out under the seats and through the front door. So maybe they don’t do it on purpose but they just leave it in the buses. The buses are very crowded so it would be hard for a conductor to go up and down collecting people’s garbage. People just carelessly leave their garbage lying around, whether it’s in the bus…they didn’t throw it out but it blows out.”

Reporter

“So it’s just a matter of people becoming more conscious about what they’re doing?”

Yvonne Hunter

“If you had to come out here and do what we are doing you would see what we’re talking about, about being more conscious. Even my granddaughter I teach her fold up your little chips bag baby…fold it up and put it in the little pocket on your bag and when you get home you do something with it. You don’t just leave it where you are.”

By early afternoon the group had filled three hundred fifty gallon garbage bags, three dump-truck loads of garbage in just three miles of highway.