Charles Kong Soo

The poster boy for the an­ti-lit­ter cam­paign of the mid-80s is back with a vengeance. The old lit­ter-bug of "Chase Char­lie away!" fame has been re­vamped and digi­tised in­to Char­lie 2.0 for the new gen­er­a­tion and has been made pub­lic en­vi­ron­ment en­e­my num­ber one.Aid­ing and abet­ting Char­lie or be­ing like Char­lie in lit­ter­ing can be ex­pen­sive now as the fine for lit­ter­ing has been in­creased by 100 per cent, from $1,000 to a whop­ping $2,000.

The "Char­lies" in busi­ness or­gan­i­sa­tions can now al­so in­cur a 100 per cent in­crease in the penal­ty for lit­ter­ing, from $2,000 to a stag­ger­ing $4,000.Sol­id Waste Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny Ltd (SWM­COL) Pub­lic Ed­u­ca­tion Ad­min­is­tra­tor, Gise­le Telfer, said it was hoped that the stiff fines would act as a de­ter­rent to lit­ter­ing.

Char­lie was un­veiled at the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty's (EMA) launch as part of its Project To­mor­row cam­paign by ini­ti­at­ing the Na­tion­al Bev­er­age Con­tain­ers Clean-up Project at the Hy­att Re­gency on Oc­to­ber 8.Sev­er­al full-page ads of Char­lie have ap­peared in the news­pa­pers with the mes­sage to cit­i­zens to dis­pose of their trash prop­er­ly.SWM­COL chair­man Nali­ni Sook­lal said, "We lis­tened to the cries of the pub­lic to bring back Char­lie.

"Many peo­ple would re­mem­ber the cam­paign back in the 80s, and we thought it was a re­al­ly op­por­tune time to rein­tro­duce the pub­lic to Char­lie."What the in­ter-agency teams hoped was that by us­ing Char­lie, we can close that gen­er­a­tion gap where par­ents can re­con­nect, re­mem­ber and in­tro­duce Char­lie to their chil­dren in a new and mod­ern way."We did some work on the orig­i­nal im­ages that were very old, digi­tised him and made Char­lie more ap­peal­ing to younger chil­dren."

Sook­lal said it was a four-way col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween SWM­COL, the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA), the Com­mu­ni­ty En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion En­hance­ment Pro­gramme (Cepep) and the In­sti­tute of Ma­rine Af­fairs (IMA).She said what the clean-up was seek­ing to do was to re­move all the dis­card­ed bev­er­age con­tain­ers that were in the en­vi­ron­ment, which would then pave the way for the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the Bev­er­age Con­tain­ers Bill which would be laid in Par­lia­ment short­ly.

Ram­bachan: I fully­sup­port the cam­paign

Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Dr Su­ru­jrat­tan Ram­bachan said 145 lit­ter war­dens were man­dat­ed to work in terms of the Lit­ter War­den Act and be "re­al­ly ag­gres­sive" with lit­ter bugs.Ram­bachan said he ful­ly sup­ports the cam­paign, which was brought for­ward by Min­is­ter of the En­vi­ron­ment and Wa­ter Re­sources Gan­ga Singh.He said the pass­ing of the bill will al­so have a tremen­dous im­pact on the ini­tia­tive to get rid of all the plas­tic waste strewn across the coun­try.