How to recycle in Panama?

Recycling is one of the best ways for you to have a positive impact on the world in which we live. Recycling is important to both the natural environment and us. We must act fast as the amount of waste we create is increasing all the time.

The amount of rubbish we create is constantly increasing because:

• Increasing wealth means that people are buying more products and ultimately creating more waste.

• Panama Real Estate Boom and increasing population means that there are more people in Panama to create waste.

• New packaging and technological products are being developed, much of these products contain materials that are not biodegradable.

• New lifestyle changes, such as eating fast food, means that we create additional waste that isn’t biodegradable.

In Panama there is a strong demand for waste paper and cardboard for recycling, because it is more profitable than virgin pulp. Products that are recycled includes paper from excess of the production process in plant and printers, used office paper, newspapers, manila, portfolios, cardboard, paper waste mixture as lottery tickets,

Etc..

And one of the ways to recycle in Panama is to sell them to companies that uses and has a strong demand on recycled resources to produce their products such as:

Moldeados Panameños, S.A. (MOLPASA) located in Via Tocumen, recicles newspapers. This company´s produces egg cartons. And it´s main activity is the production and sale of packaging for the poultry industry in the lines and separators kits.

MOLPASA uses clean and dry newspapers, and paper for their production process. The paper is placed in a large tank in which is crushed and mixed with chemicals and water. This then passes through a cleaning process to ensure that it does not have contaminants. Then the pulp is used to produce the final product, whether dispensers for eggs or container vessels.

Other important export products including recycled paper components, Toilet paper, napkins and towels are produced mainly by Papelera Istmeña SA.

The production process begins by placing paper products in a large tank to which

soap, water and bleach are added; this mix is "whipped" to obtain semi consistency . Apart from waste paper, around 10% of virgin Kraft paper is added to the mixture. Different kind of papers are used, depending on the type of product that is going to be manufactured. For example, to the markets of Panama and Ecuador, White paper is only used , because there is no market for colored toilet paper in these countries. However, it is possible to mix a certain amount of colored paper and paper products if they are sold to other Central American markets.