The Government has not left ReGen, as it claimed, and will not say what leaving cost.

ReGen was the plan to replace the George Town landfill with a plant that would burn waste to make electricity, plus new recycling facilities. A group of companies led by Dart was to build and run it. The Government signed the contract in March 2021, announced on 25 July 2024 that it would leave because of the cost, and said on 24 March 2025 that the project had terminated. It had not. The Ministry of Health, Environment and Sustainability told The Caymanian Journal (TCJ) in a letter dated 3 September 2026 that it is withholding records on the project because the exit is unfinished. Katherine Ebanks-Wilks MP, the Minister for Health, Environment and Sustainability, told Parliament on 30 April that she expects the exit to be concluded by the end of this year, 10 weeks from today. The landfill the plant was meant to replace caught fire in April and will be full by the end of 2030 at current volumes, she said.

The public has been given two figures for the cost of leaving and no total. The Government's statement of 24 March 2025 said: "Following the termination of the ISWMS project, CIG is required to pay invoices totalling up to [CI]$17.7 million for work completed by the Dart Consortium and verified by the Government." The statement does not say which dollar. It added: "This work was carried out at the Consortium's cost and ahead of financial close, with the intent to reduce the length of the build programme for the new ISWMS project facilities." On 15 October 2025 the minister told Parliament that Cabinet had moved CI$2.3 million within her ministry's budget to close the project out. CI$900,000 of that went to two Dart companies, Waste Solutions Cayman Ltd and DECCO Ltd, for what her statement called "continued processing of end-of-life vehicles and scrap metals under the Early Works Agreement - Project Agreement" from March to December 2025, under the deal the Government had declared terminated. A further CI$274,000 went to the same two companies for termination costs for January and February 2025, and CI$376,000 to professional fees "required to close out the ISWMS project, ensuring that outstanding contractual obligations are met with the remaining agreements". TCJ asked the ministry and the Department of Environmental Health (DEH), which runs the landfill and the recycling depots, 40 questions about what ReGen and the recycling programme have cost. The questions went in two requests emailed on 16 and 17 August under the Freedom of Information Act, the law that gives anyone the right to the records a public body holds. Not one has been answered. Both bodies say they intend to refuse.

The recycling plan waits on the exit

The minister said so herself. Ebanks-Wilks told Parliament on 30 April: "As I mentioned at the beginning, our exit negotiations are critical to informing how we move forward with the recycling workstream and the long-term solution." The plan she set out that day, compulsory recycling for businesses, a new sorting plant for recyclables by 2029 and a lined landfill on Government land next to the current tip to carry the site to 2036, rests on an exit the Government has been negotiating since 2024 and twice announced as done. She also told the House that day why the Government walked away: "Based on a number of technical reports including a report by the OAG affirmed the view that the previous ReGen arrangement was considered as unaffordable, high risk and not delivering value for money. It would have committed this country to decades of financial obligation, leaving future generations in debt." On the exit itself she said: "These exit negotiations began in 2024, and we are fully committed to bringing them to an agreeable close so we can focus our attention and resources on the long-term solution."

She also set out what is at stake if nothing changes: "The truth is simple. If we keep sending the same volume of waste to the same place, the current landfill will reach capacity by the end of 2030." She said 49% of what enters the landfill comes from businesses and two-thirds of that could be recycled, which is why recycling will be made compulsory for them. The lined landfill, which she called Site 4, is "a deliberate, well-considered infrastructure decision that extends the operational life of the landfill to 2036 - provided there are no major hurricanes", she said. She has put CI$6 million into the plan this year and CI$2 million next year, and expects a steering committee to produce the first outline of a long-term system by the end of this year.

Forty questions, none answered

The recycling request asked DEH, for every year since 2015, how much was collected by type, how much was shipped abroad and to where, what proof exists that it was recycled rather than dumped, how much was rejected as contaminated, and what the programme cost and earned. The ReGen request asked what the Government has spent on the project since 2014, what it has paid and still owes Dart's group, what termination cost, what built works are still usable, what it is spending on a replacement and what it earns from waste. It also asked the ministry to reconsider the commercial-sensitivity redactions applied to earlier ReGen records now that the project has been terminated.

DEH answered none of it. It kept two of the 29 ReGen questions, on waste tonnage and the landfill's remaining life, and has not answered them. It folded two more into the recycling request and sent the other 25 to the ministry on 18 August. The ministry answered none of those either. Carolina Ferreira, the ministry's Information Manager, wrote on 3 September: "If we were to seek to comply with this request, it would amount to an unreasonable diversion of the resources of the policy, project management and finance teams at the Ministry of Health, Environment and Sustainability (MHES)." She added: "Searching for and reviewing these records would require months of dedicated work from multiple employees across at least three Ministry teams." Her finance staff are preparing for the Auditor General's interim audit and a Government-wide forecasting exercise, the letter said, and pulling them off that "would not only risk degrading internal service standards but also materially impact the timeliness of payments to our suppliers and other core financial management functions".

Yolanda Morales-Carvalho, DEH's Information Manager, wrote on 14 September: "To fully comply with your request as currently written, we would need to redact a commercial data base of our Scale House with more than 250,000 rows recording every single entry of waste to the George Town landfill, on a daily basis over a decade." The Scale House is the weighbridge that logs every load tipped at the landfill. She said DEH coordinates between 18 and 25 shipments of recyclables overseas each year and that reviewing the paperwork "would require multiple dedicated working days from multiple employees". For 2025 and 2026, she said, the records are not held in the form TCJ asked for and would have to be extracted by hand from several systems. She offered a way through: "If you sufficiently narrow the scope of your request or accept the high-level summaries available, we may be able to provide you with some of the information you are seeking."

Both bodies relied on section 9(c) of the Freedom of Information Act (2021 Revision), which excuses a public authority where "compliance with the request would unreasonably divert its resources". The regulations under the Act require the authority to explain that in writing and invite the applicant to narrow the request, which stops the 30-day clock for an answer. They also say the decision must be made case by case, weighing the size of the authority, the number and volume of records and the staff time involved. The same regulations say the public interest includes anything that would "promote accountability for public expenditure or the more effective use of public funds". The cost of a terminated public contract is public expenditure.

The same reason for 22 months

The unfinished exit has been the Government's reason for not stating the cost since December 2024. Dwayne Seymour MP, then Minister for Sustainability and Climate Resiliency, told Parliament on 13 December 2024: "Mr Speaker, as the exit of the Project Agreement has not been finalized, it would be ill-advised to discuss specific details at this time, as the Member should be well aware. Once the Government is in a position to share the final details it will do so." The ministry's September letter gives the same reason, and says the same records are now before the Ombudsman, the independent office that hears appeals when a public body withholds records. Ferreira wrote: "Furthermore, there is currently an appeal before the Ombudsman for similar records which have been exempted by MHES given that the project has not in fact been fully exited." The letter does not say who appealed, what records are at issue or what is left to exit.

The ministry suggested TCJ read the Auditor General's report on the project instead. That report, published on 24 January 2025, stops at October 2021: before the decision to leave, before the termination and before every payment made since. It cannot contain the figure TCJ asked for. The ministry also pointed to the annual reports and audited financial statements of the ministries that have held responsibility for waste, which record spending by department and year but do not isolate the cost of the project or its exit.

TCJ emailed the ministry on 15 October asking what remains to be exited, whether the invoices of up to 17.7 million have been paid, whether the Dart companies are still processing vehicles and scrap in 2026, and what the Ombudsman appeal covers. The ministry had not responded by the time of publication.

What the published tables say, and what they leave out

DEH pointed TCJ to the Economics and Statistics Office's Compendium of Statistics 2024, the Government's statistical yearbook. Table 19.02a, sourced to DEH, records 3,178 tons of recyclables collected in 2024, up from 557 tons in 2015. Of the 2024 total, 857 tons are "other recyclable products", which the table does not define; plastics were 65 tons, batteries 46, aluminium 36 and paper 11. Glass, recorded at between 286 and 392 tons a year from 2018 to 2022, disappears from the table in 2023 and 2024. DEH also processed 1,560 scrapped vehicles in 2024. Table 19.01a puts total waste managed at the three landfills at 138,185 tons in 2024; on TCJ's calculation the recyclables collected are 2.3% of that, and the Compendium does not say whether the two figures overlap. The tables do not record where the material went, what it sold for, what the programme cost or how much was rejected. Those were TCJ's questions. The minister's figures of 49% commercial waste and two-thirds of it recyclable appear in neither table.

What happens next

The minister's deadline for finishing the exit is 31 December 2026. Until then the Government's position is that the cost of leaving ReGen cannot be disclosed because it has not finished leaving. TCJ does not intend to narrow either request. Both bodies have said they will refuse the requests as written, and a refusal can be appealed to the Ombudsman.