In the height of Carnival revelry comes an appeal to masqueraders and spectators to use recycling bins placed in strategic areas throughout the streets of San Fernando.Concerned about the environment, San Fernando West MP Carolyn Seepersad-Bachan made the call yesterday.
It came on the heels of her launch of Greening San Fernando Carnival simultaneously with the San Fernando Carnival launch two Fridays ago. The MP has also been running advertisements in the newspapers asking the public to use the bins, which have been placed in specific areas for the Carnival festivities.In a telephone interview yesterday, Seepersad-Bachan said: "The basis for that initiative is that at Carnival time we generate a lot of plastic bottles and tins and glass bottles and so on.
"We know that glass bottles get picked up a lot. There are those who actually go through the streets and pick them up and return them, but you know plastic bottles, there is no economic value for it right now."So we have gotten some bins which are designed with some spouts on top of it and one is labelled plastics, where you put in your pastic bottles and the other is for tins and what will be done is that they will be taken for recycle purposes. They will be picked up by a company that would want to recycle them."
She said the bins were first placed in Skinner Park at the Calypso Fiesta event as a trial run."For Monday and Tuesday we will be placing them at all the strategic points, mainly the judging points and we will have a little banner there telling people to use the bins there to get rid of the plastic bottles and the tins. I am appealing to people to use these bins so that we can keep our own landfill clean."
Recalling the black smog which engulfed Port-of-Spain after a fire at the Beetham landfill last month, Seepersad-Bachan said: "I thought that was such a horrible experience, the burning of that (Beetham) landfill."She said San Fernando also has a serious problem with its own landfill.
"We don't want that sort of thing to happen, because you know there is the burning of plastics that are carcinogenic, that thick, thick smoke that we could not see through and they had to wear masks...a lot of it had to with the burning of the plastic and the tins and that is what they considered to be dangerous to your health."
Seepersad-Bachan said she has already discussed with stakeholders putting the bins in schools. In addition, she said she will be encouraging businesspeople to place recycling bins at their workplaces and arrange for people to collect their plastic and tin disposals.