Cherisse Moe

It doesn't take much rain to cause se­vere flood­ing in Trinidad. A ma­jor part of the prob­lem is lit­ter­ing and the fact that the ma­jor­i­ty of the pop­u­la­tion is seem­ing­ly un­aware of what it means to be en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly con­scious. Plas­tic bot­tles, tires and even house­hold ap­pli­ances like re­frig­er­a­tors, float­ing in the na­tion's rivers, have be­come an all too fa­mil­iar sight. With law­mak­ers around the globe now mov­ing to­ward im­ple­ment­ing 'green' prac­tices and cre­at­ing a health­i­er en­vi­ron­ment for their cit­i­zens, one lo­cal non-gov­ern­men­tal or­gan­i­sa­tion (NGO)-It's Up To Me Nvi­ron­men­tal-has tak­en up the man­tle to help ed­u­cate cit­i­zens on the im­por­tance and ben­e­fits of re­duc­ing, reusing and re­cy­cling.

It's first or­der of busi­ness is to dis­trib­ute sin­gle-stream re­cy­cling bins to 150,000 homes in five re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions, name­ly Diego Mar­tin, San Juan/Laven­tille, Tu­na­puna/Pi­ar­co and Ch­agua­nas. So far, the am­bi­tious project has been en­dorsed by sev­er­al of­fi­cials, in­clud­ing Min­is­ter of Works and In­fra­struc­ture, Jack Warn­er, Min­is­ter of Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment, Nizam Baksh, as well as Ch­agua­nas May­or, Or­lan­do Na­gas­sar. "We need to change our be­hav­iour­al prac­tices as a peo­ple,' stat­ed vice pres­i­dent/mar­ket­ing, Bar­bara Quam­i­na. "It's time for us to be­come more re­spon­si­ble."

Pub­lic re­la­tions of­fi­cer/di­rec­tor, Stephan Har­ris, shared sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments. He said the NGO, launched in Au­gust 2010, had al­ready ap­proached The Green Fund of T&T to pro­vide fi­nan­cial as­sis­tance to get the project off the ground. Stat­ing that they would al­so be part­ner­ing with ex­perts from Eng­land to "bring their ex­per­tise here in Trinidad," he said mem­bers were keep­ing their fin­gers crossed that they would re­ceive pos­i­tive feed­back. "As far as we know, Trinidad will be­come the first Caribbean na­tion to in­tro­duce this type of re­cy­cling holis­ti­cal­ly at homes. We al­so hope to pur­chase at least ten spe­cial­ty re­cy­cling ve­hi­cles to trans­port the ma­te­ri­als from the homes to be re­cy­cled."

The ad­van­tages of re­cy­cling, Har­ris stat­ed, were many. "It re­duces our car­bon foot­prints, green­house gas­es, flood­ing and even dis­eases like dengue," he ex­plained. "If every­one prac­tised re­cy­cling we would be able to take al­most half of the waste from the Beetham Land­fill which is al­ready over­flow­ing." Recog­nis­ing that the fu­ture of the na­tion re­lied on its youth, Har­ris said the NGO al­so planned to ed­u­cate the na­tion's stu­dents on re­cy­cling and prop­er waste dis­pos­al.

"Get­ting through to adults is al­ways a chal­lenge be­cause they al­ready have a cer­tain way of think­ing. We need to reach our young peo­ple so that they can ed­u­cate their par­ents and change their gen­er­a­tion." And ac­cord­ing to As­sis­tant Sec­re­tary, Ria Ram­roop, the NGO has al­so em­barked on a mas­sive mul­ti-me­dia cam­paign to pro­mote re­cy­cling ben­e­fits. She not­ed they were pre­pared to work as­sid­u­ous­ly to help cre­ate "a bet­ter T&T." Ar­tic­u­lat­ing that she is aware that change will not oc­cur overnight, Ram­roop said the key was "get­ting every­body in­volved."