Padarath: Government weighing SWMCOL’s future

KAY-MARIE FLETCH­ER

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­[email protected]

Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Bar­ry Padarath yes­ter­day re­fused to rule out pri­vati­sa­tion or a pub­lic-pri­vate part­ner­ship for the Trinidad and To­ba­go Sol­id Waste Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny (SWM­COL), say­ing the state en­ter­prise’s busi­ness mod­el must change to re­duce its bur­den on tax­pay­ers.

Dur­ing the Stand­ing Fi­nance Com­mit­tee’s ex­am­i­na­tion of the Min­istry of Pub­lic Util­i­ties’ 2027 bud­getary al­lo­ca­tions, for­mer Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Mar­vin Gon­za­les asked whether the Gov­ern­ment was con­sid­er­ing pri­vati­sa­tion or a pub­lic-pri­vate part­ner­ship in the sol­id waste man­age­ment sec­tor.

Padarath stopped short of com­mit­ting to ei­ther op­tion but said none had been ruled out.

“We are wait­ing to get the in­for­ma­tion from the RFIs. Once that comes in, we have our own think­ing, but ob­vi­ous­ly we need to con­sult with the stake­hold­ers, see what the pro­pos­als are, and I will not rule out any op­tion that is avail­able to us,” he said.

Padarath said SWM­COL’s busi­ness mod­el need­ed to change. Tax­pay­ers, he ar­gued, could not con­tin­ue to fi­nance the com­pa­ny while pri­vate op­er­a­tors ben­e­fit­ed from its re­sources with­out pro­vid­ing a fi­nan­cial re­turn.

“The re­al op­er­a­tional is­sues must im­pact the bal­ance sheets, the dol­lars and cents of the com­pa­ny and it must make sense to the tax­pay­er that if they are be­ing asked to car­ry this bur­den, that there must be a re­turn and there­fore we are more in­ter­est­ed in look­ing at the busi­ness mod­el of the com­pa­ny,” he said.

“There must be a vast change in the ap­proach to the way in which the com­pa­ny is struc­tured in terms of its busi­ness mod­el to make it prof­itable in­stead of mak­ing it a bur­den to tax­pay­ers. Be­cause there is the el­e­ment of the com­pa­ny that al­lows for the com­pa­ny to be in a sit­u­a­tion where they can make a prof­it as op­posed to just pure­ly be­ing de­pen­dent on gov­ern­ment sub­ven­tion,” he added.

Gon­za­les al­so asked whether the Gov­ern­ment re­mained com­mit­ted to im­ple­ment­ing three poli­cies de­vel­oped un­der the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion: the Re­cy­cling Pol­i­cy, Sol­id Waste Man­age­ment Pol­i­cy and In­te­grat­ed Waste Man­age­ment Pol­i­cy.

Padarath said Cab­i­net had re­scind­ed, in De­cem­ber 2025, a May 2024 de­ci­sion ap­prov­ing a re­vised pol­i­cy frame­work for the mu­nic­i­pal sol­id waste man­age­ment sec­tor and SWM­COL’s trans­for­ma­tion.

He al­so said Cab­i­net agreed in Ju­ly this year to is­sue a Re­quest for In­for­ma­tion (RFI) to iden­ti­fy op­por­tu­ni­ties for the en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly sound pro­cess­ing, treat­ment, trans­porta­tion, dis­pos­al and re­cov­ery of waste across Trinidad and To­ba­go.

The Gov­ern­ment’s ap­proach, he said, would be in­formed by the RFI’s out­come and a sub­se­quent Re­quest for Pro­pos­als (RFP) process.

Padarath added that the pre­vi­ous trans­for­ma­tion plan had not ad­e­quate­ly ad­dressed SWM­COL’s op­er­a­tional chal­lenges.

“While there was a de­vel­op­ment of a tran­si­tion plan for the trans­for­ma­tion of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Sol­id Waste Man­age­ment, a lot of the the­o­ret­i­cal things in­volved in the trans­for­ma­tion plan did not sig­nif­i­cant­ly ad­dress the sys­tem­at­ic chal­lenges that SWM­COL ex­pe­ri­ences. And there­fore, the time has come where the mod­el of SWM­COL must change,” he said.

Padarath claimed that some pri­vate en­tre­pre­neurs were ob­tain­ing raw ma­te­ri­als from SWM­COL with­out pro­vid­ing the com­pa­ny with a fi­nan­cial re­turn.

“What I have dis­cov­ered in­side of SWM­COL is that you have many en­tre­pre­neurs who get their raw ma­te­r­i­al from SWM­COL and there is no re­turn to the com­pa­ny. And that has been left to lan­guish for quite a while,” he said.