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Tuesday, July 8, 2025

The beverage container problem

by

20130304

When I was younger I did a long in­ves­tiga­tive piece about bev­er­age con­tain­ers and re­cy­cling. This may have been pub­lished in the late 90s and at the time, as I re­call, there was a dra­mat­ic na­tion­al prob­lem with plas­tic bot­tles as there were no lo­cal op­tions for plas­tic re­cy­cling.

Glass was less prob­lem­at­ic as we had, and still have, a lo­cal glass re­cy­cling plant; there were and are a few op­tions for pa­per re­cy­cling as well, and cans and oth­er scrap met­al were col­lect­ed and ex­port­ed. There were no lo­cal­ly avail­able re­cy­cling op­tions for the Tetra Pak–the ubiq­ui­tous juice box that is si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly an en­gi­neer­ing mar­vel and an en­vi­ron­men­tal night­mare as it sand­wich­es plas­tic, pa­per and alu­mini­um in a com­bi­na­tion that re­quires pro­pri­etary tech­nol­o­gy to sep­a­rate each el­e­ment in the sand­wich and make it avail­able for re­cy­cling. (On­ly 20 per cent of all Tetra Paks are re­cy­cled glob­al­ly every year, ac­cord­ing to a Wikipedia ar­ti­cle.)

All the peo­ple I in­ter­viewed for the sto­ry agreed the coun­try des­per­ate­ly need­ed a bev­er­age con­tain­er re­cy­cling plan.Last year the Bev­er­age Con­tain­ers Bill was fi­nal­ly in­tro­duced in Par­lia­ment–and sum­mar­i­ly kicked out. The bill, as its ex­plana­to­ry note says, sought "to pro­vide for the es­tab­lish­ment of the Bev­er­age Con­tain­ers Ad­vi­so­ry Board, a de­posit and re­fund sys­tem for pre­scribed sizes of bev­er­age con­tain­ers, a regime for the col­lec­tion of bev­er­age con­tain­ers to re­duce their dis­pos­al in­to the en­vi­ron­ment, there­by al­le­vi­at­ing the pol­lu­tion prob­lem and for oth­er re­lat­ed mat­ters."

It is heart­break­ing to feel that we sim­ply do not care enough about the en­vi­ron­ment and the lega­cy we are leav­ing to push through the chal­lenges and ap­prove this bill. Clear­ly we need leg­is­lat­ed in­cen­tives for bev­er­age man­u­fac­tur­ers, dis­trib­u­tors and con­sumers to take re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the waste these prod­ucts gen­er­ate.It's not all ter­ri­ble news in T&T, how­ev­er. Plas­ti­keep has cre­at­ed an in­no­v­a­tive way to get young peo­ple in­volved in re­cy­cling plas­tic. For the sec­ond con­sec­u­tive year, it is run­ning a plas­tic col­lec­tion com­pe­ti­tion among school chil­dren in north­west Trinidad. A press re­lease from Plas­ti­keep said, "The 'Plas­ti-thon' com­pe­ti­tion, tak­ing place from Feb­ru­ary 18-March 8, has been de­vel­oped by Plas­ti­keep to en­cour­age school chil­dren to be­come aware of the dan­gers plas­tic pos­es to the nat­ur­al en­vi­ron­ment and to wildlife, and to sup­port them in be­com­ing avid plas­tic re­cy­clers and life-long care­tak­ers of the en­vi­ron­ment."

As the T&T Guardian re­port­ed in Jan­u­ary, "There are ap­prox­i­mate­ly 70 mil­lion plas­tic bot­tles man­u­fac­tured and used in T&T a month."Sev­en­ty mil­lion bot­tles every month. That's as­tound­ing–and it on­ly ac­counts for bot­tles, not oth­er plas­tics such as shop­ping bags, gro­cery pack­ag­ing or clamshell pack­ag­ing for elec­tron­ics. Most of this plas­tic ends up in land­fills but an alarm­ing amount of it is just thrown in­to drains and bush­es, where it will even­tu­al­ly find its way in­to our wa­ter­ways and seas, killing wildlife and maim­ing ecosys­tems.

When I was a lit­tle child, soft drinks came in glass bot­tles for which there were re­funds. I re­mem­ber when cans came in­to vogue–my sib­lings and I were ea­ger to get our hands on them to grate off their tops and use the cans as cups. These met­al cans were re­cy­clable. And then the Jaliter changed every­thing; sud­den­ly every­thing was in a PET bot­tle and once you'd pret­ty much filled your fridge with all the Jaliters of wa­ter it could hold, it was in­to the garbage with the rest. And we nev­er looked back.

I'm glad for the Plas­ti-thon. I'm thrilled that Plas­ti­keep re­ports that some 27 schools and 15,000 stu­dents are tak­ing part in it this year; if the en­thu­si­asm of the St Fran­cois Girls' Col­lege stu­dents is any gauge, there are lots of chil­dren and their par­ents walk­ing around pick­ing up plas­tic right now as the Fran­cois girls and some par­ents were do­ing at Car­ni­val.

What would thrill me even more? A sus­tained cul­tur­al shift in which we are more aware of our plas­tic use and make more of an ef­fort to re­cy­cle these plas­tics.I would be hap­pi­er still if this were cou­pled with a re­turn to re­funds for all glass bev­er­age bot­tles. I might ac­tu­al­ly faint for joy if we got a Tetra Pak re­cy­cling plant in T&T.Change is in­evitable. But we must recog­nise that in­dus­tri­al progress has con­se­quences and we must work to mit­i­gate these con­se­quences. In­deed, we must thirst to do so.


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