By ANNE HILTON Thursday, September 2 2010

ASK ANY school student how we can lighten the load on the Beetham — and other — landfills in TT and the answer is bound to be “The Three ‘R’s’ — Reduce, Recycle, Reuse”.

Scavengers on the landfills may add another ‘R’ — Recover — while students in Fifth and Sixth forms and university undergraduates and the Wastes businesses will complete the list with ‘Remove’.

Let’s start by reducing, by slimming down wastes to the bare minimum. So much of what we buy comes in fancy packaging, designed to attract us but absolutely murder on the landfills. Yes, I know, computers have to be packed in sturdy cartons with rigid polystyrene (is it) foam to protect them from damage — as do other delicate electronic toys.

However looking around what passes for my office, I ought not to have bought a rigid plastic and sturdy carton pack of a couple of dozen ballpoint pens (my pens go AWOL with distressing regularity); I could have bought them without that fancy packaging. I pride myself on buying re-fill reels of Scotch tape to put in the dispenser I’ve been using for the past seven or eight years.

I reckon the bargain pack of three dozen AA batteries I bought in PriceSmart instead of buying packs of two or four at a time, saved an inch or two on the Beetham —although it might have been better to invest in rechargeable batteries for my camera, cordless mouse, tape recorder, remotes for the TV, DVD.

Moving to the kitchen and the great outdoors, there’s the menace of plastic bottles. Hard as it may be for teenagers to believe, it’s only in the past ten-15 years that supermarkets have been selling bottled water — apart from the gourmet stores selling spring and mineral waters such as Evian, Perrier and San Pelligrino to the discerning drinker. Ask for a bottle of water in Hi Lo, United Grocers —or wherever and you’d be thought a candidate for St Ann’s. What? Buy water? You must be mad!

Trinis didn’t die like flies from drinking WASA’s best, or boiled water (for those who, mistakenly, never trusted WASA). Natural disasters excepted when bottled water is the only safe drinking water, bottled water is a luxury we really can’t afford while our landfills stagger under the weight of plastic … which brings us to the second ‘R’ —Recycle — which is bound to be the retort of water bottlers, and bottlers of sweet drinks in general. Once upon a time, whether the teens believe it or not, drinks of any kind were only sold in glass bottles — from beer to Coca Cola, wines and spirits to Solo Apple J and more. In the 60s and early 70s bottle collectors went from door to door collecting bottles from households— until the money paid for used glass wasn’t worth the effort of collecting it. Whereupon there were glass bottles everywhere, some whole, some broken, on pavements, roadsides, playing fields and empty lots, on river banks and sea shores.

Glass bottles were a menace, a threat to the environment until Carib Glass increased the price the company paid for empty glass bottles. Like magic, within, so it seemed, a week bottles littering highways and byways disappeared. I reckon the only glass bottle to escape those cashing in on the bottle bonanza was a lone Black and White whisky bottle left behind, one imagines by US servicemen on the Aripo Savannahs bordering the airstrip at Fort Read where, to the best of my knowledge, it remains to this day.

Recycling glass is no problem, or not much of a problem thanks to Carib Glass’ seemingly insatiable appetite and the prices paid for used glass. Would that the same could be said of industry’s appetite for used plastic in general and PET plastic in particular. Photographs of rafts of sweet drink and drinking water PET plastic bottles floating down the East Dry River (to mention but one river choked with empty plastic bottles) is proof, if proof were needed, that it’s not worth while to collect used plastic. Over the years since the first plastic drink bottles appeared on the market there have been sporadic attempts to collect waste plastic for recycling. Please note that I write “to collect waste plastic for recycling”, not “to recycle waste plastic” because so far as I was aware the last time this subject was featured in my environment writings, no one was recycling plastic waste in Trinidad or Tobago. Various bodies — some commercial, some NGOS — collected waste plastic, baled it (squashed it flat) and shipped it to the US.

Most attempts to rid the land of plastic waste have failed due to the vagaries of the market in the US. When waste plastic was in demand and the price was right, it was well worth someone’s while here to collect and ship waste plastic to plants in the US. However, when factories and plants in the US had as much plastic waste from their local suppliers as they could handle, they dropped the price paid for waste plastics shipped in from overseas so that it wasn’t worth anyone’s while, be they in business or well intentioned NGOs, to collect, bale and ship out waste plastic.

This week I’ll be visiting a waste collection and recycling business in Central; we’ll see what the current situation is with regard to waste plastic next week …