Lit­ter bugs could soon be a thing of the past as cit­i­zens be­come more con­scious of the en­vi­ron­ment. This en­vi­ron­ment-friend­ly dri­ve is ev­i­dent as the streets in T&T have be­come clean­er. Port-of-Spain May­or Murchi­son Brown said he has seen peo­ple us­ing the stain­less steel bins from the We­Can Waste/Re­cy­cling & Ur­ban En­hance­ment Ini­tia­tive.

In fact, out of the 34 re­cy­cling units, 26 are in­stalled through­out PoS, where some 300,000 peo­ple pass through the city dai­ly. The clean dri­ve has al­so gone be­yond their pedes­tri­an tar­gets, and ac­cord­ing to the "We­Can" ini­tia­tive: "We are col­lect­ing large quan­ti­ties of house­hold bot­tles and cans which in­di­cates that many in­di­vid­u­als are keen­ly in­ter­est­ed in re­cy­cling their house­hold waste and are look­ing for any op­por­tu­ni­ty to do so."

Since its in­cep­tion in 2007, the ini­tia­tive has be­come in­stru­men­tal in re­duc­ing the amount of lit­ter on T&T's city streets. Brown is hop­ing to have more bins in­stalled and he said there con­tin­ues to be a marked im­prove­ment in clean­li­ness on the city's streets. Now in its third year, "We Can" con­tin­ues to in­crease the num­ber of bins through­out T&T. The project has caught on na­tion­al­ly with units in­stalled in Ari­ma, Ch­agua­nas, San Fer­nan­do, To­ba­go and Point Fortin. Tu­na­puna and Princes Town will al­so be re­ceiv­ing bins this year.

"This ini­tia­tive pro­vides a much need­ed pub­lic space ser­vice," We Can stat­ed. The ini­tia­tive al­so af­fords cor­po­rate T&T, through so­cial­ly re­spon­si­ble mes­sag­ing, "the op­por­tu­ni­ty to ef­fect pos­i­tive changes in at­ti­tudes and be­hav­iours in re­spect to re­in­forc­ing good lit­ter prac­tices. "We are al­so in the process of in­tro­duc­ing a new theme to our so­cial mes­sag­ing which show­cas­es our lo­cal artists."

In fact, the clean cam­paign has in­flu­enced an­oth­er mem­ber of the Caribbean. The Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce, St Vin­cent and the Grenadines is due to launch the We­Can Ini­tia­tive on that is­land on April 22–Earth Day.

More in­fo

�2 The We­Can Waste/Re­cy­cling & Ur­ban En­hance­ment Ini­tia­tive was launched in con­junc­tion with The Of­fice of the May­or of Port-of-Spain on World En­vi­ron­ment Day (June 5, 2007). This ini­tia­tive was de­signed to al­le­vi­ate the amount of de­bris be­ing washed from our streets in­to our un­der­ground drainage and sub­se­quent­ly in­to our wa­ter­ways (in par­tic­u­lar plas­tic bot­tles and cans).

�2 The pro­gramme is de­signed to in­cor­po­rate a uni­form, well main­tained sys­tem of waste col­lec­tion units, while at the same time sen­si­tis­ing the cit­i­zen­ry to the prin­ci­ples of waste sep­a­ra­tion; there­by en­gen­der­ing en­vi­ron­men­tal aware­ness and stew­ard­ship.