Swirling in an ocean of garbage

Dr Gabrielle Jamela Hosein

TYPICALLY, August holidays are spent at the beach, whether on the north or south coasts or in Tobago. Specific coasts are kept relatively clean by the flow of currents or sanitation workers, but those that are not often require wading through ankle-deep piles of garbage. It’s like that from Balandra to Moruga.

At one of my favourite past haunts, Yarra, it was heartbreaking to walk across the beach and let Ziya spend the day playing with driftwood and stones amidst mounds of plastic. I stopped going when I picked up a chips bag out of the river and asked a woman if she could put it in the empty grocery bag next to her and she said no because it wasn’t her garbage.

Since then, I’ve found somewhere else far from maddening crowds, but it’s impossible to escape plastic littered everywhere like shells. I happened to make a rare, mostly unwanted stop at Maracas last weekend. Scratch the surface of the sand and underneath lies a widely dispersed blanket of bottle tops, advertising Carib and Stag beer.

As with everything, there’s individual, corporate and state responsibility. Trinidadians like to leave their garbage in forests, rivers, roadsides and beaches, and they like to throw waste from their car windows. It would take a concerted public education effort to change such habits. They could change in just a generation, but a government would have to think this was a priority.

Along with public education, people also need options. Small numbers package their plastics and put them in special iCare containers for collection, but there is no national, door-to-door recycling programmem just as there is no Beverage Container Act despite its being 23 years in the making. Faris made speeches. Camille Robinson-Regis made speeches. Yet there’s no law or implementation.

People are still selling food, and shark and bake, in Styrofoam containers instead of paper boxes. Groceries are still over-packaging fruit and vegetables in layers of single-use plastic, and the Supermarket Association of TT can’t yet regulate its own practices away from being such deep polluters. Of course, bottled water is the worst culprit of all.

If you manufacture such plastic products, you should be responsible for it end-to-end, including having a campaign for its recollection and recycling. Twenty per cent of household waste that ends up in landfills is recyclable plastic, and it will sit there for generations. In practice, our waste-management system is an absolute disaster, which is why the dumps look like they do, and although this is any visitor’s first sighting (and smelling) of the capital Port of Spain, few seem to care.

It's not just us. Our species is dirty all over the world. Plastic pollution is the biggest killer of marine life. A truckload of plastic enters the ocean every single minute. The world produces around 460 million tons of plastic a year, and that is expected to triple – not reduce – by 2060. Globally, only around nine per cent of plastic waste is recycled, and large amounts eventually end up in oceans.

We are small twin islands swirling in these oceanic realities. But, like everything global, eventually microplastics become local and embedded in our food, our water and our bodies. Other small island nations are aiming not just at better recycling, but lower global production of plastics overall.

There’s a Global Plastics Treaty to fight plastic pollution being finalised for 2024. It’s being derailed by plastic industry lobbyists from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Brazil, China and India (like what deep-sea mining lobbyists are doing at the International Seabed Authority in Jamaica). Yet we all have a stake in the goal of a circular economy where all plastic is reused, recycled and responsibly managed during and after use while enabling a lower-greenhouse-gas-emissions plastic economy.

There are also local solutions. We can provide incentives to stop use of Styrofoam in the food industry, reform national waste collection and management, reduce use of plastic wrap by groceries, and educate people to take what they (and perhaps others) bring with them back home when they leave forests, rivers and beaches. Beach clean-ups are hardly enough.

It’s a problem of legislation, policy, production and circulation, not just raking up to send to Beetham or Guanapo while more ends up on coasts the next day.

These August beach days, I hope you will see the beauty I do and the garbage rising around us, which is absolutely in our power to change.

Diary of a mothering worker

Entry 513

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