THERE is a renewed call for the passage of the Beverage Containers Bill which seeks to reduce waste and money spent on the disposal of waste in the country.
The call came from Fishermen and Friends of the Sea (FFOS) in a press release on Thursday following statements made by Solid Waste Management Company Limited (SWMCOL) Chairman Ronald Milford before a Joint Select Committee virtual meeting on Monday that 95% or 700,000 tonnes of the country’s waste were dumped annually into landfills.
Corporate Secretary of FFOS Gary Aboud said that while his organisation acknowledged the chairman’s concerns, SWMCOL has failed to develop an adequate garbage sorting and collection programme.
Aboud stated, “Plastic continues to pollute our waterways, roadways and rivers. For 20 years, the Beverage Containers Bill has languished on Parliament’s shelves. This cutting-edge environmental management is designed to kick start a recycling sector. If passed it would lift the cost of the burden of pollution from the taxpayer and place a minuscule expenditure on the corporate sector while spurning a whole new industry of waste collectors. This Bill has been on successive legislative agendas without being laid in Parliament. Why? Who benefits?”
FFOS is also calling for increased litter fines and proper disposal of waste tyres.
“We generate between 800,000 to 1,000,000 waste automotive tyres per year. Whilst SWMCOL have committed to repurpose 30,000 tyres for the construction of coastal retaining walls, this is a drop in the ocean of waste tyres that we produce annually,” Aboud said.
He is also questioning what happened to monies collected from the environmental tax of $20 per imported tyre.
And he is concerned that existing landfills which are improperly sited and filled to capacity have not yet been closed stating that the Beetham landfill had become the “ toxic lung” of Port-of-Spain.
Aboud stated, “Unless our Parliamentarians act, waste collectors will continue to suffer the loss of a viable self-sustaining recycling economy and public health will be compromised in an ever-growing Gulf of carcinogens.”
