Descripción:
I never imagined that my job at a leading Dominican resort would be so dirty—at least not at the beginning. I spent my first months as environmental director of Puntacana Resort & Club with my team opening and examining hundreds of bags of garbage generated by the resort and its airport. We categorized the waste material to figure out how we might minimize the purchase of unusable materials or find alternative final destinations for our waste, rather than the dump we were using when I arrived. Tourism makes garbage. At that time, in 2005, the Punta Cana region, one of the fastest growing destinations in the Caribbean, with more than 30,000 hotel rooms and close to two million arriving passengers yearly, produced between twenty and thirty tons of garbage daily.