Single-use plastic bottles and water

THE EDITOR: We know that electricity can only be sold to the public by the TT Electricity Commission. The TTEC Act makes this clear to us.

Individuals or organisations can generate electricity through the use of solar panels or windmills. They cannot, however, sell that electricity. They can consume it themselves and we congratulate them for reducing their carbon footprints thusly, but they cannot sell their excess electricity to others and that is because of the TTEC Act.

Similarly, the sale of the water that God bestows upon TT can be pumped from aquifers or reservoirs or rivers and sold to the people of TT only by WASA. This is our state of affairs due to the WASA Act.

As with the illustration above whereby one of our more active citizens interested in reducing carbon footprints instals a windmill, people are free (and in many instances are forced) to collect water fallen from the heavens onto their roofs and to use it for their own needs. They are not permitted to sell such water.

This is stated in the WASA Act. Privately collected water (and we admire people who harvest water) is for personal consumption and not for sale.

We have now to ponder the single-use plastic bottle of water. What do we imagine they contain? Well, water, obviously. But what is the source of said water? Is it harvested from roofs? Or from water catchment ponds, or possibly from great futuristic tanks? And is this water collected from the heavens being bottled and sold? All over TT every day in hundreds of thousands of single-use plastic bottles?

We know that although your neighbour who is smarter than you can cover her roof in solar panels she cannot sell her excess electricity to you when TTEC is having a problem. Similarly, your neighbour cannot sell collected, stored water to you when WASA disappoints you.

If the companies with single-use plastic bottle cannot be harvesting the contents of those plastic bottles and selling it (and they cannot) where is the water actually coming from? Pause for reflection. The water in those horrid bottles must then be WASA-produced. It cannot be anything else.

How can this moronic practice of consuming drinking water that is mass produced by an authorised national agency but packaged in environmentally destructive plastic then resold, continue? This is not water disguised as sweet drink or even water disguised as beer...this is water being consumed from environmentally destructive single-use plastic.

A BLADE

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