Forget climate change and fix plastic pollution - Need for vital sea change

ROBERT JOHNSON

AS A weekend visitor to Trinidad’s beautiful western beaches for over 40 years, I consider myself privileged to be able to experience their natural beauty and unspoilt flora and fauna.

For example, the magnificent yellow poui trees that have suddenly blossomed this past weekend.

Imagine then that my heart is heavy as I write while looking out at the sea of plastic lining my favourite beach and floating like a carpet of litter along the shoreline. I won't bother to bore you by mentioning the “stuck record” of lip service given under the topic of tourism and the effect that this has on foreign and local visitors to this island's attractions.

Last week's April showers have washed down the “just throw it in the bush” or “just throw it in the river” plethora of plastic cups, water and soft drink bottles, fast food containers and everything else in-between.

Like the potholes that we have come to know and love and subconsciously avoid, I know this problem will never be solved by any government and, considering the Third World mindset that casually throws anything out of a car window into the “bush” or river, despite the many “Get Rid of Charlie” campaigns going back to the 60s, I am also not hopeful that my countrymen will ever change.

It has been suggested before, ad nauseam, that “the government should tax the local plastic bottle manufacturers” and use the money to do something about plastic in the sea. To which the manufacturers simply counter: “But that is not why we pay Green Fund tax? We thought it was for that sort of thing.”

As I said before, forget any government, past, present or future, as the Green Fund is being collected for over 20 years.

For a solution, therefore, I have no choice but to consider an appeal to the foreign multinationals and the various EU and UN-type organisations that are so eager to make TT conscious of our carbon footprint and who from time to time organise beach cleanups in a noble effort to bring this problem to the attention of the public.

The irony is that, admittedly without actual scientific analysis, most of this floating plastic comes from just three sources, the St Ann’s, Maraval and Diego Martin dry rivers. No need for a UWI or UTT thesis (although some may have been done) to notice that the sea is covered with floating plastic after each shower of rain.

My simple Google searches over the years have yielded a host of promising options as Trinidad is not unique and there is no shortage of inventive minds eager to show off their solutions to this problem of plastic litter in the sea. Without going into too much detail, I’ll highlight a simple, inexpensive one that I’ve seen on YouTube.

It’s made up of a simple floating boom placed at the mouth of the river that skims the plastic onto a special machine with a conveyor belt that scoops it up and then sorts it using strainers of different sizes. As an additional “feel good,” some employment can be generated (think CEPEP) to run the machine, help sort the plastic, bag it and transport it five miles away to the Beetham landfill.

Everybody can win. The Greta Thunberg (environmental activist) crowd as well as the various "carbon guilty" oil companies that can contribute .001 per cent of their local earnings to supply the capital, as well as all the other local non-profits. For example, Save our Turtles or Fishermen and Friends of the Sea that can be the operators and custodians.

Sadly, I’m not hopeful, as even though Trinidad is an island, the general mentality of most of our population is to avoid the sea and anything to do with it, except when it comes to buying some fish from the nearby vendor.

That much of this fish may be contaminated with what the scientists in this field call micro-plastics is not really considered in the same way that we, as a people, simply buy the parts necessary to fix our cars damaged by the potholes and will then unthinkingly do the same to fix our bodies when that time comes.

Yes, this affects everyone, not only the nature lovers like myself, as the “particles” will find their way into our bodies one way or another.

How can we expect to be involved in a nuanced, complex and, in my opinion, debatable question like climate change when we can’t even fix something we can see and touch? But sadly I’m old enough to know that is exactly our TT personality: jumping on all the international bandwagons from Ukraine to climate change and ignoring the basics that really affect us every day.

Forget climate change, fix plastic pollution.