A few weeks pri­or to Car­ni­val, I was dri­ving out of the San­ta Cruz area head­ing in­to Mar­aval and couldn't help but no­tice a num­ber of Cepep crews clean­ing the sides of the hills and tak­ing care of all the over­grown branch­es etc. By the time the work was com­plet­ed in a few days, what they left be­hind was a very im­pres­sive sight in terms of the clean­li­ness of the area. To my dis­ap­point­ment, short­ly there­after the "an­i­mals" who un­for­tu­nate­ly live amongst us could find noth­ing bet­ter to do but to lit­ter the en­tire area with their chick­en and chips box­es, food con­tain­ers, soft drink bot­tles etc.

Noth­ing about this may sound sur­pris­ing giv­en the cal­lous dis­re­gard that cit­i­zens con­tin­ue to dis­play for the en­vi­ron­ment and our coun­try as a whole. And I can't help but won­der if we are ever go­ing to ma­ture as a so­ci­ety and recog­nise that when we lit­ter we not on­ly cre­ate a de­spi­ca­ble eye­sore but al­so con­tribute to the long-term de­te­ri­o­ra­tion of our en­vi­ron­ment.

Peo­ple of T&T, grow up. Keep your lit­ter in a bag in your ve­hi­cle un­til you can prop­er­ly dis­pose of it. And to the au­thor­i­ties, you al­so have a part to play in this process by en­sur­ing that ad­e­quate bins are pro­vid­ed and strate­gi­cal­ly placed so that one does not have to trav­el for miles with­out be­ing able to prop­er­ly dis­pose of one's lit­ter.

Dale Mc Leod

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