(Trinidad Express) Trinidad and Tobago may soon join the growing list of countries to restrict the production, sale and use of plastic bags, following a suggestion to that effect by President Anthony Carmona in his World Environment Day message yesterday.
World Environment Day has been observed annually on June 5 since 1972, and has in the past decade found stronger roots in this country, where the eco-conscious movement has grown, slowly but steadily.
This year’s theme is “Think.Eat.Save.” and encourages citizens globally to eat local and be aware of their eco-footprint.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation has estimated 1.3 billion tonnes of food are wasted and one-third of global food production is either wasted or lost every year.
Carmona said this “ought to be intolerable in a world where, to this day, more than 20,000 children under the age of five die daily from hunger”.
In his message yesterday, Carmona praised this year’s theme, and called for a return to the days when paper bags ruled the supermarkets.
“The world’s growing population and rapid development have exerted pressure on our global environment to match our ever-increasing needs and wants,” Carmona said.
“Furthermore, by giving ourselves first priority, the impact of our actions on the environment has been detrimental and unsustainable. There is, therefore, a critical need for us to cultivate a real awareness of the impact on our surroundings of the decisions we make. As Mahatma Gandhi once said, ‘Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.’”
He added: “I applaud the theme for this year’s World Environment Day celebrations, ‘Think.Eat.Save.’, which takes the form of an anti-food-waste and -food-loss campaign and challenges us to reduce our footprint by choosing, for example, to eat locally produced foods and foods with less environmental impact.”
Carmona said there is still much for this country to do to manage its environmental impact, and he said he has taken note of China’s decision five years ago to restrict plastic bag use.
“In a relatively small nation such as ours, there is still much that we can do to reduce our individual and collective negative impact on our environment,” Carmona said.
“One area which I would like to suggest is that of the use of plastic bags in our supermarkets and retail outlets. The scourge of the international retail trade is the plastic bag. I have noted the measures taken in the People’s Republic of China, for example, where five years ago, shops, supermarkets and retail outlets were prohibited from handing out free plastic bags and the production, sale and use of ultra-thin plastic bags under 0.025 millimetres thick were banned.
“This singular measure has resulted in a two-thirds reduction in the use of plastic bags in these establishments and the saving of millions of tonnes of plastic and of the oil which the plastic bags consume. For the sake of our environment and of our children and our children’s children, it may be a good time to consider going back to the ‘old time days’, where we walked out of the supermarket with a brown paper bag. As stated in a Native American proverb, ‘We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.’”
In addition to choking waterways and landfills, plastic bags, which can take hundreds of years to degrade, have also become a threat to marine wildlife.
Endangered sea turtles, whales, dolphins and other marine animals often mistake plastic bags floating in the ocean for the jellyfish they feed on and are often choked to death when they consume the bags.
