I’ll try to post essays and notes on the things I spend my days on: ocean energy, water, food systems, climate adaptation, teaching and entrepreneurship on a small island and just the small (and sometimes) big ideas that run through my mind. Some pieces will seem like finished arguments; others will be ideas I’m still working out, and I’d welcome replies and support on working these out in more detail.

The old political material isn’t gone. The program and my writing from 2020–2021 are kept in the archive, for the record.

If something here is useful, or wrong, email me.

The statutory minimum of Afl 11.58 an hour works out to Afl 2,007 a month for a full-time worker. The Central Bureau of Statistics puts the bestaansminimum, the income a single person needs to live adequately, at Afl 2,700 as of September 2026. That leaves a full-time minimum-wage worker Afl 693 a month short, or Afl 518 short even after the reparatietoeslag top-up. It is the second-largest September gap in six years. Prices rose 3.0% in the year to September, led by transport (up 11.1%) and food (up 3.5%). The outgoing Prime Minister after announcing his retirement from politics wants to close that gap of roughly 25% as soon as possible. The Labor Department counts 20,066 private-sector workers, 43.3% of the total, earning below that line.

The Prime Minister is right in wanting to close the gap, but it seems to me that we are about to do it the wrong way. The coalition debate has shrunk to two questions: how fast, and how much compensation for business. The other half of the bargain is missing. If we ask employers to pay a third more for their lowest-paid workers, we also have to let them run their businesses in a way that can absorb it. That means relaxing the rules that make hiring in Aruba slow, risky and expensive.

The SER saw this coming in its January advice. It supports a phased raise but says a first step in 2026 is not feasible. It warns that employers will cut hours, delay hiring, automate or move work into the informal economy. Its answers are all on the cost side: tax credits, wage subsidies and deductions. These are important, but somehow nobody is even mentioning restructuring employment laws as a precondition.

Why wages have to rise

Aruba sells wellness and a high quality of life to the world. The people who make that happen should be able to live it too. Almost everything we eat, drive, wear and build with is imported and paid for in dollars, so our wages have to cover world prices. We will not keep our young professionals from staying in the Netherlands with wages that don’t even cover the basics.

But wages that last have to be earned. Tourism is our export, and what we earn per visitor decides what the island can pay. Higher-value tourism, better training and more productive businesses let wages rise without pushing up prices or killing jobs. Law can set a floor but I think productivity has to do the higher lift.

Housing

Housing shows the limits of a raise. Foreigners can buy here without restrictions, with incomes earned in North America and Europe, according to general statistics non-residents already own at least 11% of our vacation rentals. No local wage can compete with that. We hear that a 100 m² home now costs close to Afl 300,000 to build, with a 6.5% mortgage over 30 years, that is about Afl 1,900 a month, around 35% of what two adults earn together even at the bestaansminimum. And if incomes rise while land stays scarce, a lot of the raise ends up in the land price. Rental rules in Aruba make it worse: A landlord needs the Huurcommissie’s permission to end an open-ended lease, the same committee can review the rent, and eviction for non-payment usually takes about three months of arrears. A court even ruled that wanting to re-let at a higher rent is not a valid reason to end a tenancy. Owners fear that a local tenant is a risk they can’t undo, while a vacation rental pays more and is free again next week with easier inspection and insurances that pay for any damages. No surprise that lodging in vacation rentals has skyrocketed while hotels haven’t grown at all. Making long-term renting safe for owners will bring supply to local families without building a single wall.

What the raise really costs

Closing the gap means adding about Afl 693 a month to the full-time minimum, roughly 35%. With employer premiums, that is about Afl 865 a month, over Afl 10,000 a year, per worker. One proposal in Parliament, Afl 1.33 an hour per year for three years, adds about Afl 71 million to private payrolls in 2027 and Afl 213 million a year by 2029.

In a big economy, part of that money comes back: workers spend it locally and create more local jobs. Here that loop is broken. We import about 93% of our food and almost everything else, so the extra florins mostly leave the island, the cost stays here. With the florin pegged to the dollar, we can’t devalue our way out either. Something has to give: productivity, margins, prices or jobs. We should choose which.

The raise also won’t stop at the minimum. With 43% of private-sector workers below the bestaansminimum, a new floor of Afl 2,700 swallows a big part of the workforce. The cashier at Afl 2,400 and the cook at Afl 2,600 end up on the same pay as the new hire, and the supervisor at Afl 3,000 is only a few hundred florins ahead of her team. Few businesses can raise everyone by the same percentage. So the bottom goes up, the people just above get little or nothing, and then prices rise. The bookkeeper, the technician and the young professional pay for it. We would be squeezing the middle class even more.

The government sets part of the price itself. Since August 2023 every import pays 7% BBO, BAVP and BAZV at the border, on top of import duties. Shops can deduct it only on goods they resell as they are. A restaurant’s ingredients or a builder’s materials carry it as a cost and then pay 7% again on the final sale: about 14.5% in turnover tax alone, before import duties. The BBO at border is one of the drivers of our cost of living.

The big hotels will manage, they have pricing power and tipped staff. The small businesses, mini-market, the family restaurant, the local farm and the small contractor will not.

Hiring and firing

In most of the private sector, you can’t end a permanent contract without a dismissal permit (ontslagvergunning) from the Department of Labor (DAO). Without it, the dismissal is void and the wage keeps running. The principle behind this is noble: protect workers from arbitrary firing but the result is that every permanent hire becomes a long-term liability. Employers hire less, hire later, use agencies, and pick only the safest of candidates. Young workers, the people coming back to work, the ones with a gap in their CV, the very people a minimum wage should help, are the first ones left out. Suggestions for the need for Aruba to make its labor market more flexible to back to more than a decade. Making every hire a third more expensive while firing stays this hard only makes it worse.

Sick days

Sick leave is a large hidden cost, and it hits small companies hardest. SVb pays 80% of the wage only from the fourth day. The first three days are on the employer. Short absences are rarely checked: you report sick online, you may have to stay home in case an inspector shows up without need for a doctor declaration. Many employers see the same pattern: one or two days off around weekends, paydays and holidays, from the same few people. Companies can’t dismiss someone during illness unless they have been unfit for more than a year. Frequent short absence is not even a ground for dismissal.

For a resort with 300 staff, one missing cleaner is usually just a scheduling headache. For a business with six people, it means everything, a closed counter, leading to less sales, the owner working a double shift, or overtime on the rest of the staff. Small firms have no spare staff, so they pay more than double: for the person who isn’t there and extra for whoever covers. Raise wages by a third and every unchecked sick day costs a third more. Curaçao has tested a fix in 2025: workers at six high-absence firms had to report in person on the first and third sick day. Sick days per case and wage-loss payments went down.

The deal

I propose that a wage increase goes hand in hand with other reforms:

1. Raise the wage to the bestaansminimum in phases from 2027, with a check on prices and jobs before each step, as the SER asks. Update the bestaansminimum first, since it still rests on an older methodology.

2. Replace the dismissal permit with clear rules: notice plus severance that grows with years of service, like the Dutch transitievergoeding, and the courts for unfair or discriminatory dismissal. Keep DAO oversight for mass layoffs only.

3. More room to try before committing: a longer trial period and more fixed-term contracts before a job becomes permanent.

4. Flexible hours adjusting to seasonal economy and workers needs.

5. Faster work permits, tied to a sector instead of one employer. Ends the dependence and openings for abuse of workers.

6. Sick leave that can be checked: SVb check by day two or three for frequent reporters, a doctor’s note after a set number of short absences, a documented pattern as grounds for dismissal, and the SVb paying the first three days for firms under ten employees.

7. Compensation through lower premiums, not profit tax. Bonaire raised its minimum wage by about 42% in 2023–2024 and cut employer premiums from 13.4% to 10.3%. Aruba should lead with cutting taxes that raises costs of living.

8. No more stacked tax at the border. Make the border BBO deductible on all business inputs, or drop it, and finally move to the VAT that has been promised for years.

9. Safe long-term renting: fixed-term leases that end on time, fast eviction for non-payment, indexed rent increases, and registered, fairly taxed vacation rentals.

What stays: the minimum wage itself, health and safety, protection during real illness, and the rights to go to court.

What the unions will say

The unions will probably say flexibility means insecurity: the government gives with one hand and takes the job away with the other. Dismissal protection gives workers bargaining power, and the evidence on minimum wages and jobs is mixed. Bonaire’s big increases have not yet caused the collapse some predicted.

Real security comes from employers who keep hiring. A clear severance formula protects everyone, including those who can’t pay a lawyer or wait months for a committee. A higher minimum wage only helps the people who get hired. And a doctor’s check costs a sick worker nothing, while the colleagues covering for those who aren’t sick will thank us.

The Prime Minister is right that wages must rise, and the Finance Minister is right to want the numbers first. But nobody is talking about the labor laws. The Social Dialogue already has wages and pensions on the table. Add dismissal, sick leave and rentals, and let unions and employers bargain over the whole package. That is how Aruba gets a living wage and an economy that can pay it.

My thesis, Valorization of Reverse Osmosis Brines in Small Islands, was defended in May 2024. To valorize is to turn a waste stream into something with VALUE. My main conclusion is that a desalination plant does not have to be just a water factory with a waste pipe. It can be a seawater refinery, where fresh water is one product among several.

Why Aruba is the right place to ask

Few places have more experience with desalination than we do. The first commercial plant on the island dates from around 1903, WEB has produced public water since 1932, and since 2015 all of our water comes from seawater reverse osmosis. Water sales bring in about US$54 million a year, and desalination uses roughly 13% of the island’s electricity.

We are also not alone. At least 28 Caribbean islands run seawater desalination plants, with about 650,000 m³ a day of installed capacity between them. Whatever works at Balashi can be copied from Curaçao to the Cayman Islands.

What I tested

I looked at different ways to get value out of the brine but then focused on four main possibilities: lithium, chlorine and caustic soda, energy, and magnesium.

Lithium was the one everybody asked about, and it was also the clearest NO. Our brine holds about 0.33 mg of lithium per liter. Even if we captured every atom from the whole stream, we would get about one tonne a year. That does not pay for a plant. I did build and test a new type of electrode, manganese oxide held in a Kevlar film, that could one day soak up lithium passively at many plants and be shipped to one central facility for processing.

Chlorine and caustic soda (sodium hydroxide) are made by splitting salt water with electricity. Aruba imports about US$2.7 million a year of these products, and the desalination plant itself uses caustic soda. Making them locally would cut the risk of shipping chlorine by sea. It makes sense, but it is a small local market, not an export.

Energy can come from mixing brine with treated wastewater. In pressure retarded osmosis, fresh water flows through a membrane into the salty side and the pressure it builds drives a turbine. I modeled about 0.25 kWh per m³ of mixed water. With the Bubali treatment plant 13 km away, the pipeline kills the economics and payback runs past 30 years. With a treatment plant next to the desalination plant, the payback could drop to about five years. The lesson for planners is simple: the next wastewater plant should sit near Balashi.

Magnesium was the clear winner. Our brine carries about 2,150 mg of magnesium per liter. In the lab at KU Leuven, working with an MSc student, we added caustic soda to brine-strength solutions and precipitated over 95% of the magnesium as magnesium hydroxide, Mg(OH)₂, within minutes. That is the first step of the Dow process, which supplied much of the world’s magnesium from seawater in Freeport, Texas, from 1948 until a storm wrecked the plant in 1998. The chemistry is proven. What is new is doing it with renewable power, on a brine stream that already exists.

The magnesium numbers

The arithmetic is short. 60,000 m³ a day at about 2.15 kg of magnesium per m³ is around 129 tonnes a day, or roughly 47,000 tonnes a year. World demand in 2021 was about 1.03 million tonnes, so the whole stream at Balashi holds close to 5% of it.

Where that magnesium comes from today matters more than the volume. In 2021 China supplied 88% of the world’s magnesium, mostly through the Pidgeon process: dolomite rock heated with ferrosilicon in coal-fired retorts, in batches of about 11 hours, with workers loading and emptying the tubes by hand. It emits about 28 kg of CO₂ for every kilogram of magnesium. Electrolytic plants running on hydropower come in at about 8.5 kg, and 5.3 kg when they recycle their chlorine. The footprint is set mostly by the electricity, so magnesium from brine and solar power belongs at the low end.

Europe noticed. Magnesium metal is on the EU’s strategic raw materials list. The Critical Raw Materials Act sets a 2030 goal that no more than 65% of any strategic material should come from a single outside country. Aruba is part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, has a brine stream, a disused refinery site and plenty of sun. That is an unusual combination.

There is a hard constraint, and it is energy. Refining magnesium metal takes about 14 to 25.6 kWh per kilogram. For 47,000 tonnes that means 660 to 1,200 GWh a year, while the whole island generated about 937 GWh in 2018. Turning all of our brine into metal would need about as much electricity as the whole island uses today, or more, most likely from offshore wind. So metal is a long-term goal, and the place to start is magnesium hydroxide.

Magnesium and cleaner cars

Magnesium is the lightest structural metal: 1.74 g/cm³, about a third lighter than aluminum and three quarters lighter than steel. According to the US Department of Energy, magnesium alloys can cut the weight of some parts by more than half, and every 10% cut in a car’s weight improves fuel economy by 6 to 8%. For electric cars, a Frost & Sullivan study for Messe Frankfurt puts the gain at 4 to 6% more range for the same 10%. Batteries make electric cars heavy, so every kilogram saved elsewhere means a smaller battery or a longer drive. Yet magnesium is still less than 0.5% of the weight of an average vehicle, mostly because of cost.

The catch is the production footprint. A 2015 life-cycle study in Environmental Science & Technology found that replacing steel with magnesium usually raises the emissions of building the car, and that the fuel saved over the car’s life usually, but not always, makes up for it. That calculation gets tougher for electric cars. As grids get cleaner, each kilogram saved on the road avoids less CO₂, so the CO₂ spent making the metal counts for more. An earlier study by Hakamada and colleagues adds that recycling magnesium parts is essential for the climate benefit to hold.

So the climate case for magnesium in cars depends on where the magnesium comes from. Coal-fired magnesium at 28 kg CO₂ per kilogram makes lightweighting a weak trade. Solar-powered magnesium from brine, made with a fraction of that, makes it a good one. That is where an island like ours could fit into the vehicle supply chain.

Cars are not the only market. Magnesium hydroxide is sold as a flame retardant, for neutralizing exhaust in ship scrubbers and in pharmaceuticals. Reactive magnesium oxide can be used in cements that absorb CO₂ as they harden, which is worth exploring with our local construction sector.

From thesis to project

I am now working with local and Dutch partners on the first step: a module on the former refinery terrain in San Nicolas that would take about a tenth of the brine and produce roughly 11,500 tonnes of magnesium hydroxide a year. It would make its own caustic soda with bipolar membrane electrodialysis, which splits salt water into acid and base with electricity, powered by dedicated solar. A side benefit is that the brine going back to the sea would be less salty.

I want to be honest about the money. A first module this size will not pay commercial investors on its own. It is a demonstration plant that needs grant support, and its job is to prove the technology at real scale so that the larger phases can be financed on normal terms. Our studies show that the economics improve with scale, and that is the reason to build the first step well.

What should happen next

1. Treat brine as a resource in policy. The water utility, the government and the environmental authority should agree that brine can be supplied, under clear rules, to a company that recovers materials from it.
2. Put the next wastewater plant near Balashi. Co-location makes energy recovery possible and closes the water loop on the island.
3. Start with magnesium hydroxide, not metal. It proves the process with energy we can supply and builds the track record that a metal refinery would need later.
4. Use it to train our people. The SISSTEM BSc and MSc programs can supply the engineers and researchers, so the knowledge stays on the island.

For a hundred years we have been world leaders in turning seawater into drinking water. The next step is to use the rest of what we pump out of the sea. The brine is already there every day, and the first module should be built before the decade is out.

The thesis was supervised by Prof. Bart Van der Bruggen (KU Leuven) and Dr. Nigel John (University of Aruba), within the EU-funded SISSTEM program. The main findings are also published in the Journal of Chemical Technology and Biotechnology.

Energy first

The machines most people have in mind work much like a large dehumidifier. A compressor cools a coil below the dew point, water condenses on it, and you collect it in a tank. Our warm and humid trade-wind air is actually quite good for this, but it still takes a lot of energy. Physics puts the floor at around 0.30 kWh per liter in our conditions, and real machines use more. I assumed 0.45 kWh per liter for a mid-size unit and more for small ones, since independent tests of small units have measured two to four times the energy their vendors advertise. Off-grid, that energy has to come from small wind turbines or solar panels and batteries sitting next to the machine, and that is where most of the money goes.

What the model says

I set up a planting site of 1,000 trees that need water at the roots through their first two dry seasons, roughly 310 liters per tree in total, and ran it through 200 simulated rain sequences based on the Meteorological Department’s 30-year averages so that dry years are included. I didn’t treat any water as free. Trucked water pays for the water itself, the truck hours, a tank on site that has to be moved to the next planting, and the drip lines. The machine pays for its panels, batteries, storage, upkeep and moves.

With my central assumptions, spraying trees from a water truck, which is how many plantings could be watered today, comes to about US$56 per tree over two years. If the same truck instead fills a tank on site that feeds drip lines, the cost falls to about $16. A solar-powered AWG feeding the same drip lines comes to about $84, or $58 if you add a plastic sheet to catch rain. For 1,000 trees it would take a machine drawing about 29 kW with close to 60 kWp of solar panels behind it. When I varied all the uncertain inputs together, the truck-filled tank came out cheaper.

Those are central assumptions, though, and the machine gets a lot closer at the optimistic end. If the machines perform near the physical limit, cost about $1,300 per kW, last 12 years and rarely break down, the AWG drops to around $45 per tree, which already beats spraying. I also looked at a more modest job for the machine, only keeping seedlings alive from planting until the heavy rains arrive, using low-end pricing. That costs about $12 per tree for the season against $5.70 for a truck-filled tank, and with the best-case inputs it falls to about $7.20. At a site a kilometer from the nearest road, where people would otherwise have to carry the water in by hand, the machine was the cheaper option in more than a quarter of the runs, without counting the effort of getting the machine up there in the first place.

Where I would try it first

The machine makes most sense where trucks can’t get in reliably but a vehicle can get in once to install it, and where it can stay put. In the bridging case the machine, panels and batteries are only about a third of the cost. The rest is storage, setting up, moving the kit to a new site every year, drip lines and maintenance visits. A unit that stays in one place for years, feeding several plantings around it or a permanent orchard or food forest, avoids much of that, and it’s a case I still need to model. A machine that also supplies drinking water at a ranger post or field station would share its cost with another use. Rain helps as well. Gutters on the machine’s own solar panels cost very little, and every liter of rain they catch lowers the cost of the system. With the low turbine prices I used, small wind turbines on our trade winds even made it into the cheapest design.

Too many unknowns

To me the most important result is not the cost comparison but how much of it rests on guesses. I couldn’t find reliable numbers on how much water our native seedlings would need, or how many survive under each way of watering. For the first dry season, the literature supports anything from a survival ration of 10 to 30 liters per tree, delivered through a deep pipe, to a few hundred liters for healthy growth. A tenfold range like that moves the cost of every option, machine or truck.

We also don’t know what a water truck really costs here. Taking conservative numbers for trucking into account, making water on site can look interesting. Machine efficiency here is still a question mark. In the field it could be anywhere from 0.30 to 0.90 kWh per liter, and we still don’t know how the coils will hold up in our salty coastal air or how often the machines would sit idle waiting for parts.

The rain is another question mark. Our Meteorological Department describes the rainy season as September to January, which brings almost three quarters of our annual rain, but there is no official date for when it starts. In six years of daily records, the rain since 1 September reached 100 mm, enough to leave young trees on their own, around 22 October in a typical year. In 2015 it didn’t get there, and October to December brought only 38 mm. KNMI’s climate scenarios for Aruba point to a drier island with a longer dry season, which would make a water source that doesn’t depend on rain more valuable over time.

How the water reaches the tree matters as well. In our heat and wind only about 45% of the water sprayed into a basin around a tree will stay in the root zone, compared with about 85% for drip or a deep pipe. In a trial in the Sonoran desert, seedlings watered through deep pipes had 71% survival against 23% for surface watering with the same small amount of water. An AWG feeding drip lines gets that benefit by design, but we haven’t tested whether a small, steady supply helps young trees more than a good soak every week or two. Frequent shallow watering could keep roots near the surface, so it could go either way. And of course none of this helps if goats get to the trees first. There’s an estimate that Arikok alone has around 1,500 goats, and unfenced seedlings would rarely survive a week.

What is next

Most of these questions can be answered in two planting seasons. A trial with about 200 seedlings, split between truck spraying, a tank with drip and a tank with deep pipes at two water levels, with soil moisture sensors and a monthly count of what survives, would tell us what our trees actually need. Alongside it, a mid-size AWG with coated coils and a modern refrigerant such as R-32 or R-290, run for at least three months at a coastal and an inland site, would show what a machine really produces per kWh in our air and how often it breaks down.

We have started these trials, but in Aruba, with limited resources, the research goes slowly. At the University of Aruba we have a small machine for testing, and this summer two Penn State students, Brian and Bradley Roseborough, have been working to find a good off-grid power solution for it, so it can run with no grid connection at all.

The rest is cheap. With 30 years or more of daily rainfall from the Meteorological Department and a few simple rain gauges at the planting areas, we could set a sensible planting trigger, for example 50 mm of rain since September or soil wet to 20 cm.

I don’t know yet whether water from the air will become part of how we plant trees in Aruba, but I’m curious enough to keep testing it, and I hope others are too. If you have experience watering native trees here, run a water truck, or have a site that could host a trial plot, I’d like to hear from you.

Thank you to the National Lab of the Rockies, the Aruba Hotel and Tourism Association (AHATA), Iberostar and Penn State for supporting this research. Thanks also to Dr. Brian Fronk and Dr. Margaret Busse at Penn State for their help, and to Brian and Bradley for their work this summer.

Read the article on the UF MAE website

It covers the road from Gainesville to Aruba, with stops in the Netherlands, Belgium and France. It also covers the SISSTEM program at the University of Aruba, which I like to describe as an academic start-up: STEM bachelor’s and master’s degrees built around the problems a small island actually has, from energy, water and waste to mangroves, coral reefs and beach erosion.

The piece also touches on my PhD, defended in May 2024 jointly with KU Leuven, on recovering magnesium and other resources from desalination brine. Aruba makes its drinking water from the sea and has plenty of sun and wind, so the brine we pump back into the ocean could become a source of materials instead of a waste stream.

Two points from the interview are worth repeating here. First, an engineering solution only works if people accept it, regulators allow it and politics can carry it, and engineers sometimes forget the people. Second, small islands have a real chance to lead. As I told them, “The islands can show the way.”

Thank you to UF for the article, and to everyone in Gainesville who made those years count.

I am glad to see that most parties in this election are continuing to acknowledge that the dependence on foreign oil for our energy is unsustainable. Unfortunately, the last debates and public appearances of most political leaders show their lack of understanding of what’s required. Both MEP And AVP had their fair chance to make the reforms necessary but their policies resulted in stifling innovation in the energy sector. As early as 2010 Aruba looked forward to a role of leader in renewable energy for the world, only to see other islands in the Caribbean move at a faster pace in implementation and development of alternative and clean energy technologies.

Despite the strong political influence that the governments in the past years have tried to place on WEB, I must recognize that WEB has done a good job at avoiding most of that influence and becoming one of the most efficient utilities in our region. In broad terms, they are doing a good job in executing their mandate, reliability and stability in price above all. Unfortunately the search for reliability comes into conflict with innovation and it is wrong for Arubans to expect innovation to come from our utility, on top of their already critical roles of producing energy and water in a reliable and safe manner. A change in policy is required and politicians need to start listening to the experts in the field (plenty of them in Aruba) if we are to really decarbonize and allow our citizens to take ownership of their free, renewable energy resources.

Solar power should not be reserved to the wealthy but real financing opportunities should be enabled for everyone to benefit. The large expanse of the ocean offers incredible opportunities that are yet to be tapped, not only by harnessing its power directly but also serving as a place where environmental and social conflict with Wind or Solar energy expansion can be eliminated.

I also hear lots of talk about a future in Hydrogen from concerned citizens; I share that vision, but you need to learn how to walk before you can run. Hydrogen is not an energy source it is solely a storage medium, in order for us to tap into the possibilities that the wonderful H2 molecule can enable we will need first to cover large amounts of our territory and the current need for energy with solar, wind and ocean energy technologies. I fail to hear from others concrete plans to achieve this.

I’m proud of the concrete pathways that Accion21 outlines in our plan for Aruba, only by allowing niche innovation to flourish in harmony with our nature will we be able to reach the goals we are setting for ourselves.

I read with astonishment the news this past week in which Serlimar, a ‘Sui Generis’ company, has decided to threaten with stopping waste collection to any and all households which do not come to a payment arrangement with them on the years of uncollected fees. It is understandable from Serlimar’s point of view to act this way, but it is unreasonable that the governments prior allowed them to get to this point. What will happen when a neighbor who has been without income and surviving on food vouchers for the past year is not able to pay the accumulated years of Serlimar fees? Will our streets be covered in litter then? Will that person be forced to throw their trash in the nearest empty lot or do a clandestine midnight dump by the ocean? Will pests and odor start to creep into the houses of those that did pay?

They make the flawed case that the trash collection service is similar to WEB or Elmar, nothing could be further from the truth. Only in cases where there’s disproportionate use of the service (as is the case with commercial trash pickup) should this service be seen as such. As a solution, a basic waste management collection and processing system can be well maintained through a centralized levy system which also encourages participation of Serlimar along with private companies, big and small. The system as it was designed and maintained by our government instead of encouraging competitiveness and efficiency is encouraging non-compliance and inefficiency, evident in people not paying their bills and having two and sometimes three or more different trucks passing through our streets, a true example of unsustainable behaviour.

The model we tried doesn’t work, a new structure is required with a clear separation of waste collection services and processing services, encouraging and enabling waste separation at source. Only then will we be able to truly avoid a new dump like the Parkietenbos disaster from rising on our island again.

Due to their small scale, most tropical islands suffer from high energy costs related to the import of liquid fuels, such as diesel or heavy fuel oil.  With conventional electricity costs often ranging well above 20 to 50 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour, these countries would benefit from the more rapid implementation of sustainable energy alternatives.

With relatively low investments and short time scales, intermittent penetration of wind and solar energy can reach high shares on small-island electricity grids. In a few Caribbean island nations, such as Aruba, Curacao, and Bonaire, wind and solar penetration has exceeded 30 percent of the peak power demand within just a few years following policy implementation. At these penetration levels, the need for grid stabilization becomes evident. Technology implementation based on the lowest “levelized cost of electricity” (LCOE) becomes less useful with higher implementation of renewables, as other cost components (profile costs, grid stabilization, storage, etc.) start to affect the system cost of energy.

Recently, the United Nations ratified SIDS-DOCK, a sustainable energy initiative born from the specific needs and circumstances of small island developing states (SIDS). Tropical islands and developing countries rely on organizations such as the UN and on think tanks like the Worldwatch Institute to help them charter a path to sustainable development and to create the necessary policies to achieve their goals. However, these assessments tend to focus on mainstream renewable energy technologies such as wind and solar, touching only briefly on the need to develop alternatives like ocean energy.

One of the main conclusions of Worldwatch’s Sustainable Energy Roadmaps for the Caribbean is that a huge opportunity exists in the area of energy efficiency. Commercial and industrial cooling (such as in hotels) represents one of the largest energy needs of tropical island nations and is where the largest possibilities for savings can be found.

Seawater Air Conditioning (SWAC), a proven and mature technology already being used in some Pacific countries, can provide an efficient solution to cooling needs. SWAC technology makes use of the cold seawater (approximately 4–6 degrees Celsius) available at depth near the coasts of most Caribbean nations. The water is delivered by means of a large-diameter deep-sea pipeline to the coast, where heat exchangers then replace energy-intensive chillers and transfer the cooling to concentrated districts (in a similar manner to district heating systems in Europe and North America).

This method can result in savings of up to 90 percent in cooling energy. A recent feasibility report from the Latin American Development Bank CAF proves the economic attractiveness and other benefits of SWAC-based district cooling systems for both Jamaica and Dominican Republic, as well as for other smaller islands. This report was made public in November 2014 at a conference in Santo Domingo by the Dominican Republic’s Minister of Energy. SWAC provides both a viable and a necessary solution to large-scale energy-efficient cooling that can be implemented without the need for subsidies.

The thermal energy in the ocean also can be harnessed by means of Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) a technology that has been recognized as having the largest resource and economic potential of all ocean energy technologies. Two grid-connected OTEC pilot plants are currently in operation, one in Japan and one in Hawaii, and several other pilot and commercial OTEC projects are planned around the world. Among these projects, the Dutch developer Bluerise is working with different parties in Curacao to develop a commercial project based on the installation of SWAC technology and a 500-kilowatt OTEC plant, and the European Union has approved financing of a 16 megawatt OTEC plant in Martinique to be built by French shipbuilder DCNS.

Given their strong potential in higher latitudes, wave and tidal energy have dominated most of the literature on ocean energy. Until now, there has been relatively little interest in industrialized nations in developing OTEC technologies, given that the potential lies mainly in tropical regions. This has resulted in less public information regarding the status of the technology. Nonetheless, commercial and innovative companies have seen the opportunity to make use of the ocean thermal energy resource by taking advantage of the advance of other related offshore technologies.

Ocean thermal energy has prime potential in the tropics, which are home to more than 40 percent of the world’s population. Given their current circumstances, tropical islands are the perfect place to start. Yet most governments of small-island nations do not have the capability to develop these technologies and should not be required to carry the financial burden. Rather, their role is to implement policies that are conducive to enabling private sector and international investment. Doing this requires the assistance of experts who can help them see beyond the mainstream.

With the right policy, technical, and financial support, tropical nations can harness the power of the ocean to provide emissions-free baseload energy that can balance grids that have high intermittent penetration of renewables. This can provide the missing step in the path to 100 percent renewable energy in these regions.