Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor - News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

A new study has found that 97 per cent of the de­bris record­ed on To­ba­go’s At­lantic-fac­ing beach­es was plas­tic, but the garbage is not com­ing from where you think it is.

The re­port, Char­ac­ter­is­ing ma­rine plas­tic de­bris ac­cu­mu­la­tions on To­ba­go coastal en­vi­ron­ments, has point­ed to garbage trav­el­ling on At­lantic waves from dif­fer­ent coun­tries and land­ing on the coast­lines of To­ba­go. It is by no means a new phe­nom­e­non but one that rais­es alarm bells.

The re­searchers con­clud­ed that oceano­graph­ic fac­tors—cur­rents, winds and waves—are more im­por­tant than pop­u­la­tion den­si­ty alone in de­ter­min­ing where plas­tic ac­cu­mu­lates. Some heav­i­ly pol­lut­ed At­lantic beach­es are in sparse­ly pop­u­lat­ed ar­eas.

The study was con­duct­ed in June and Ju­ly of 2024 from re­searchers of four in­sti­tu­tions in­clud­ing Cardiff Uni­ver­si­ty, UWI, the In­sti­tute of Ma­rine Af­fairs, and the North East Sea Tur­tles, Man-O-War Bay Cot­tages from Char­lot­teville. Its find­ings were pub­lished at the end of Au­gust this year.

It is the first stan­dard­ised as­sess­ment of ma­rine lit­ter on To­ba­go’s rur­al coast­lines, based on eight beach­es sur­veyed, in which 2,404 de­bris items were record­ed. In the main re­sults, about 69 per cent over­all was plas­tic. At­lantic-fac­ing beach­es were dra­mat­i­cal­ly worse, with 97 per cent of lit­ter be­ing plas­tic, com­pared with just 16 per cent on Caribbean-fac­ing beach­es, where glass dom­i­nat­ed.

Dr Ryan Mo­hammed was one of ten re­searchers on the study. He told the Sun­day Guardian, “A lot of this is not just Trinidad and To­ba­go-de­rived. This is some­thing out there in the North At­lantic; there’s float­ing is­lands of plas­tic out there from mul­ti­ple coun­tries, so this is a larg­er prob­lem.” It is dif­fi­cult to de­ter­mine which coun­tries the garbage is com­ing from. In Trinidad’s own ex­am­ple, de­bris bear­ing the Span­ish words has washed ashore along Cha­cachacare’s coast­line, with ev­i­dence that some of it trav­elled from as far as Brazil.

Mo­hammed said once the trash lands on this coun­try’s shore­lines, it be­comes our re­spon­si­bil­i­ty.

How­ev­er, those who use the coast­lines of To­ba­go can’t es­cape blame. Much of the trash is al­so left be­hind by vis­i­tors.

Aljoscha Wothke, who serves as di­rec­tor of the En­vi­ron­men­tal Re­search In­sti­tute in Char­lot­teville, told the Sun­day Guardian he’s not con­vinced that the cur­rents play a more im­por­tant role than the pop­u­la­tion den­si­ty in lit­ter­ing. He stat­ed, “In the en­tire area that they sam­pled on the Caribbean side, that is in Char­lot­teville, there are a thou­sand peo­ple liv­ing in Char­lot­teville. If you look at the area from Kings­bor­ough down to Hope, there might be 15,000 peo­ple liv­ing. What it means for the man­age­ment is we need to im­prove the way the en­tire pop­u­la­tion is deal­ing with waste. That means, es­pe­cial­ly, dis­card­ing waste on the roads, open lit­ter bins, and throw­ing stuff in the rivers, which is still a com­mon thing. There are some cul­prits that go on and on and on.”

More alarm­ing­ly, poly­styrene was the dom­i­nant ma­te­r­i­al among meso- and mi­croplas­tics, de­spite Trinidad and To­ba­go’s ban on poly­styrene im­ports. The au­thors point to pos­si­ble con­tin­ued lo­cal pro­duc­tion, weak en­force­ment and trans­bound­ary trans­port as ex­pla­na­tions.

Mo­hammed said the reg­u­la­tions aren’t to blame. He stat­ed, “They can­not im­port these prod­ucts, so, the reg­u­la­tion hasn’t ex­act­ly failed, but the reg­u­la­tion needs to be amend­ed. What we should be do­ing is not al­low­ing sin­gle-use plas­tics, Sty­ro­foam con­tain­ers, food con­tain­ers, at all. Oth­er Caribbean is­lands have moved away from Sty­ro­foam con­tain­ers and ex­pand­ed poly­styrene.”

How­ev­er, Wothke wants an over­all ban on Sty­ro­foam. He said, “Sty­ro­foam and plas­tic bags were banned in many sim­i­lar small is­land states, for ex­am­ple in St Vin­cent, Mada­gas­car, and Ja­maica. They’re banned and im­ple­ment­ed, so they’re very good role mod­els for us, and this has to be on a le­gal lev­el, be­cause the plas­tic bags are one of the biggest is­sues next to the Sty­ro­foam. Char­lot­teville alone us­es about 5,000 small plas­tic bags in a week, be­cause every­body gets every­thing in a lit­tle plas­tic bag, and those plas­tic bags are even worse be­cause they break down eas­i­er and much faster. A ban on plas­tic bags and sin­gle-use plas­tic bags, a ban on sin­gle-use plas­tics, is ab­solute­ly nec­es­sary, and there is no rea­son ex­cept prof­its of com­pa­nies that are mak­ing prof­it on bor­rowed health of peo­ple and en­vi­ron­ment.”

One par­tic­u­lar piece of trash caught the at­ten­tion of re­searchers: a plas­tic din­ner tray with the word biodegrad­able. A Fouri­er Trans­form In­frared test—a lab­o­ra­to­ry tech­nique used to iden­ti­fy and analyse the chem­i­cal com­po­si­tion of or­gan­ic, poly­mer­ic, and cer­tain in­or­gan­ic ma­te­ri­als—re­vealed that it was ac­tu­al­ly stan­dard polypropy­lene. Mo­hammed and his team were shocked. “I think the on­ly way for us to re­al­ly ad­dress this green­wash­ing is to move away from dis­pos­able prod­ucts, be­cause it is very hard for a con­sumer to look at a prod­uct, es­pe­cial­ly one that has a stamp on it say­ing that it is biodegrad­able and dis­cern if this is true or not,” he said.

Mo­hammed fur­ther stat­ed that this coun­try’s leg­is­la­tion does not man­date that these prod­ucts need to be test­ed. He said it boils down to the con­sumer be­ing aware. “Al­so, the con­sumer needs to know that they can­not just dis­pose of these things by lit­ter­ing. Even if it goes in­to the pub­lic land­fills, the pub­lic land­fills will have chal­lenges in the way it is go­ing to be bro­ken down,” Mo­hammed added.

The find­ings sug­gest To­ba­go’s plas­tic prob­lem can­not be solved by beach clean-ups alone. From waste en­ter­ing the sea lo­cal­ly to de­bris ar­riv­ing on At­lantic cur­rents, the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty is shared. Re­searchers say stronger en­force­ment, bet­ter waste man­age­ment and re­stric­tions on sin­gle-use plas­tics are need­ed be­fore To­ba­go’s coast­lines be­come even more over­whelmed by a prob­lem that does not re­spect bor­ders.