Dear Editor,
I refer to a letter written to you on September 17 about “Goliath”. Obviously the writer has a personal reason to attack what the government and my company believe is good for Belize. As he says, “it is plastic and styrofoam that carpet our landscape.” You do not see Belikin Beer, Guinness, Lighthouse, Coca-Cola, Fanta or Sprite glass bottles because these all have a value in the form of a deposit, and consumers take care of them to get their money back.
There have been many surveys done of “plastic” debris in Belize, and the lowest of all found has been Coca-Cola, Fanta and Sprite bottles because we have placed a value on them by voluntarily buying them back.
The writer is so shameful that he asked you not to print his name. However, you may want to tell him that his information of the Barbados legislation is wrong. Their deposit by law on glass bottles and cans is 20¢ and on plastic containers 10¢. They also make importers pay retailers at least 20% more than these deposit rates when they make refunds of deposits on the containers that they import. Barbados also ruled that beer in metal containers must pay 75¢ extra tax on each container. The issue of deposit value is so strong in Europe that the deposit rate there for any container is at least 75¢ each. In Belize the proposed deposits are 25¢ for glass or metal and 5¢ for small plastic containers and 25¢ for large ones.
The so-called protection of “Goliath” may be because of the huge taxes that he pays (the highest on beer or soft drinks anywhere in the Caribbean or the Americas), or maybe the employment his investments have created, or maybe the import duties and business tax paid (breweries and soft drink manufacturers do not pay any import duties in CARICOM), or maybe because all of our governments since independence have appreciated the world class level of investments that “Goliath” has made.
Sir Barry M. Bowen