The US Virgin Islands Integrated Solid Waste & Materials Management Plan
The UVI Caribbean Green Technology Center (CGTC) has partnered with the VI Waste Management Authority (VIWMA) to create a new Integrated Sustainable Material Management Plan for the USVI. This plan investigates how waste is currently managed in the Territory and proposes new means of managing it that is sustainable and resilient for Virgin Islanders today and tomorrow.
The Plan is separated into two volumes. Volume I addresses the policy framework, such as governance, regulatory environment, material-by-material legal landscape, economics, and the financing architecture required to fund a sustainable system. Volume II addresses operational reality: what is generated, how it is collected, why the system struggles, what the technical options are, and what should happen in what order. The two volumes are designed to be read together: the operational picture in Volume II and the legal and financial architecture in Volume I are not parallel tracks.
READ THE DRAFT PLAN
Plan Themes
Governance
Legal authority to govern solid waste management in the U.S. Virgin Islands is distributed across multiple statutes and agencies. Understanding how that authority is allocated, and where it is overlapping or structurally incomplete, provides important context for improving waste management in the USVI.
Economics
Funding and managing waste management in the USVI is a multilayered and complex landscape. Despite having multi-million dollar grants to support infrastructure, day-to-day operations are chronically underfunded, dependent on local government allocations and still burdened by legacy debt.
Material by Material Operations
Sustainable material management approaches maximize the conversion of products into others in order to minimize the amount of material reaching landfills. Thus, we discuss best practices and options to manage some of the material that offer highest possibilities for repurposing, and those that are most challenging that enter the waste stream.
Community Outreach and Public Education
Public education and community outreach are prerequisites for effective waste management operations. To be effective, outreach must be honest about service failures while committing to improvements, and must be accompanied by service improvements, otherwise it will produce cynicism.
On April 9, 2026 a Public Hearing was held to showcase a draft of the Plan to residents and receive initial comments. The recording of the session can be found below.
As part of the process, we accepted comments from the public regarding their opinions on waste management in the Territory and where and how they believe improvement can happen. The period for accepting comments is now closed.