Elgin Avenue Not Out of Mount Trashmore Deal and Won't Say the Cost

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Elgin Avenue Not Out of Mount Trashmore Deal and Won't Say the Cost

Analysis · October 25, 2026, 2:30 PM · 9 min read · Ask

The George Town landfill, which ReGen was meant to replace: it caught fire in April and the minister says it will hit full capacity by the end of 2030

The Government has not left ReGen, as it claimed, and will not say what leaving cost.

ReGen was the plan to replace the George Town landfill with a plant that would burn waste to make electricity, plus new recycling facilities. A group of companies led by Dart was to build and run it. The Government signed the contract in March 2021, announced on 25 July 2024 that it would leave because of the cost, and said on 24 March 2025 that the project had terminated. It had not. The Ministry of Health, Environment and Sustainability told The Caymanian Journal (TCJ) in a letter dated 3 September 2026 that it is withholding records on the project because the exit is unfinished. Katherine Ebanks-Wilks MP, the Minister for Health, Environment and Sustainability, told Parliament on 30 April that she expects the exit to be concluded by the end of this year, 10 weeks from today. The landfill the plant was meant to replace caught fire in April and will be full by the end of 2030 at current volumes, she said.

The public has been given two figures for the cost of leaving and no total. The Government's statement of 24 March 2025 said: "Following the termination of the ISWMS project, CIG is required to pay invoices totalling up to [CI]$17.7 million for work completed by the Dart Consortium and verified by the Government." The statement does not say which dollar. It added: "This work was carried out at the Consortium's cost and ahead of financial close, with the intent to reduce the length of the build programme for the new ISWMS project facilities." On 15 October 2025 the minister told Parliament that Cabinet had moved CI$2.3 million within her ministry's budget to close the project out. CI$900,000 of that went to two Dart companies, Waste Solutions Cayman Ltd and DECCO Ltd, for what her statement called "continued processing of end-of-life vehicles and scrap metals under the Early Works Agreement - Project Agreement" from March to December 2025, under the deal the Government had declared terminated. A further CI$274,000 went to the same two companies for termination costs for January and February 2025, and CI$376,000 to professional fees "required to close out the ISWMS project, ensuring that outstanding contractual obligations are met with the remaining agreements". TCJ asked the ministry and the Department of Environmental Health (DEH), which runs the landfill and the recycling depots, 40 questions about what ReGen and the recycling programme have cost. The questions went in two requests emailed on 16 and 17 August under the Freedom of Information Act, the law that gives anyone the right to the records a public body holds. Not one has been answered. Both bodies say they intend to refuse.

The recycling plan waits on the exit

The minister said so herself. Ebanks-Wilks told Parliament on 30 April: "As I mentioned at the beginning, our exit negotiations are critical to informing how we move forward with the recycling workstream and the long-term solution." The plan she set out that day, compulsory recycling for businesses, a new sorting plant for recyclables by 2029 and a lined landfill on Government land next to the current tip to carry the site to 2036, rests on an exit the Government has been negotiating since 2024 and twice announced as done. She also told the House that day why the Government walked away: "Based on a number of technical reports including a report by the OAG affirmed the view that the previous ReGen arrangement was considered as unaffordable, high risk and not delivering value for money. It would have committed this country to decades of financial obligation, leaving future generations in debt." On the exit itself she said: "These exit negotiations began in 2024, and we are fully committed to bringing them to an agreeable close so we can focus our attention and resources on the long-term solution."

She also set out what is at stake if nothing changes: "The truth is simple. If we keep sending the same volume of waste to the same place, the current landfill will reach capacity by the end of 2030." She said 49% of what enters the landfill comes from businesses and two-thirds of that could be recycled, which is why recycling will be made compulsory for them. The lined landfill, which she called Site 4, is "a deliberate, well-considered infrastructure decision that extends the operational life of the landfill to 2036 - provided there are no major hurricanes", she said. She has put CI$6 million into the plan this year and CI$2 million next year, and expects a steering committee to produce the first outline of a long-term system by the end of this year.

Forty questions, none answered

The recycling request asked DEH, for every year since 2015, how much was collected by type, how much was shipped abroad and to where, what proof exists that it was recycled rather than dumped, how much was rejected as contaminated, and what the programme cost and earned. The ReGen request asked what the Government has spent on the project since 2014, what it has paid and still owes Dart's group, what termination cost, what built works are still usable, what it is spending on a replacement and what it earns from waste. It also asked the ministry to reconsider the commercial-sensitivity redactions applied to earlier ReGen records now that the project has been terminated.

DEH answered none of it. It kept two of the 29 ReGen questions, on waste tonnage and the landfill's remaining life, and has not answered them. It folded two more into the recycling request and sent the other 25 to the ministry on 18 August. The ministry answered none of those either.