About 4,000 tonnes of scrap metal from the George Town Landfill, dubbed Mount Trashmore, was heading out of George Town Harbour, on its way to Tampa, Florida.

The 87 metre-long barge, the Winbuild 303 – which itself weighs over 3,000 tonnes, is the first shipment of scrap metal since the Tenders Committee awarded a contract for handling the scrap to local shipping company Cardinal D earlier in the year.

“It ends up at Tampa, at OneSteel, a very large company,” Mr Jill Bodden, owner of Cardinal D, said.

There, Cayman’s old cars, fridges, trucks and bicycles will be smelted down, and the recycled steel will be shipped, in huge ocean-going ships, to China, where they will be reincarnated –ready to start life all over again as shiny new useful items.

The company oversees all the operations between Mount Trashmore and the barge shipment to Tampa.

“We pay the Cayman Islands government CI$70 per tonne for the scrap steel, which has already been processed through the government-owned compactors,” Mr. Bodden said.

Mr. Bodden believes that his company will have to send out about one such shipment a year, to deal with all the island’s scrap metal.

“The barge takes a total of seven days to load,” Mr. Bodden said. This week, it had to move away from the dock for a while in order to let other boats in. “She should be ready to sail on Sunday (6), though,” Mr. Bodden added.

Cardinal D won the contract from the Central Tenders Committee in July this year, after a total of eight other companies submitted their applications, back in February.