A Future Centre Trust director feels the impending ban on the sale and importation of petroleum-based products should provide farmers with the perfect opportunity to expand their sugar cane crop.
Kammie Holder has called on corporate Barbados to back the ban and throw some of their profits behind other initiatives.
Holder made the comments as BICO Ltd hosted a promotional press conference for its Vegware line of products, including cups and food containers, at Cricket Legends of Barbados on Fontabelle on Thursday.
From April 1, all single-use plastics, including straws, cutlery and plastic bags, with the exception of bags used for the packaging of pharmaceuticals and medicines, hygiene products and the preservation of food, will be banned. A moratorium has, however, been granted to local juice manufacturers and poultry producers, until January 2020, in order to allow them to find alternatives to tetra pak straws and trays for chicken products, respectively.
Holder, who has been in the forefront of the fight to ban plastic bags, Styrofoam and other forms of gully-polluting items, said the ban should not be seen in a negative light but for the benefits it held.
“There are many benefits to be seen from this initiative,” he told the press conference and eco-pak biodegradable expo, hosted by BICO’s executive chairman Edwin Thirlwell and attended by the founder of Trinidad’s Hello Green, Vandana Mangroo, and global business development executive Simone Muhlack.
“This opportunity provides small farmers, and one of the greatest landowners in this country, the opportunity to provide bagasse by producing more sugar cane. So therefore we can have fuel and we can provide bagasse to Trinidad, which plans to have a manufacturing plant to make bagasse-based
Many benefits in initiative food containers,” he said.
Holder said the ban would also provide the impetus for entrepreneurs to carve out a niche in the repurposing of old clothes.
Clothes, the Future Centre Trust director said, made up some of the greatest amount of waste going to the landfill.
“So this is also the opportunity for many small businesses to start providing bags, using old clothing, where we truly embrace what is known as the circular economy,” Holder said, as he implored businesses to share their “super-normal” profits and give back through the provision of litter bins or
Future Centre Trust director Kammie Holder
(right) telling BICO’s executive chairman Edwin Thirlwell ( left), the founder of Trinidad’s Hello Green, Vandana Mangroo
(second right), and global business development executive Simone Muhlack about the Vegware containers.
(Picture by Sandy Pitt.)
funding research to find alternatives to Styrofoam.
He said people used Styrofoam containers in the wrong way, heating food in the containers, a practice that has been shown to release hormone disrupters and carcinogens.
“Sometimes we have to seek to protect people from themselves. This ban could not be a day sooner. To wait a day longer would have cost the country a tremendous amount of money, be it in health services, be in cleaning drains, be it in treating to our [increasing] mosquito populations,” Holder added. ( HLE)
