Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor-News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

At 11 years old, Sian Cuffy-Young was bathing on the beach in Ch­aguara­mas, where the board­walk now stands, when a loaded di­a­per struck her in the face.

She would make two promis­es af­ter that en­counter. The first was to nev­er re­turn to that beach, and the sec­ond was to help clean up the places she loved.

It sparked her jour­ney in­to waste man­age­ment, as she be­gan to ques­tion why any­one would ru­in a place that she loved so much.

Cuffy-Young ex­plained to WE mag­a­zine in a re­cent in­ter­view, “It sparked this in­ner light of want­i­ng to change the way peo­ple see waste and make sure that they put their garbage in a bin.”

Cuffy-Young added, “I’ve been pick­ing up af­ter peo­ple since I was about eight.”

Her fa­ther, who was a scout, in­stilled in her from an ear­ly age the con­ser­va­tion law, “You al­ways leave a place clean­er than you met it.”

And so, Cuffy-Young’s life would be ded­i­cat­ed to man­ag­ing the waste Trinidad and To­ba­go pro­duces. It would lead her to two stints at the Sol­id Waste Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny (SWM­COL).

In her first stint be­tween 2005 and 2009, she was an en­vi­ron­men­tal projects of­fi­cer, which was the think tank of the or­gan­i­sa­tion. She would come up with the com­pa­ny’s en­vi­ron­men­tal projects and ini­tia­tives, car­ry out tech­ni­cal re­views, and led all of the or­gan­i­sa­tion’s ed­u­ca­tion ef­forts.

Her sec­ond time at SWM­COL was be­tween 2014 and 2015. This time she was a re­source re­cov­ery co­or­di­na­tor be­fore be­ing pro­mot­ed to the project man­ag­er for the then Bev­er­age Con­tain­er Col­lec­tion Project.

It was af­ter she left SWM­COL in 2015, that Cuffy-Young would es­tab­lish Siel En­vi­ron­ment on her own–a means of adding a new voice and a new di­men­sion to how peo­ple in­ter­act­ed with waste man­age­ment.

“I did it al­so be­cause I have an in­nate de­sire to see my coun­try clean. Every­thing I do is cen­tred around that and the mis­sion state­ment that I cre­at­ed then, and we still have it, is to trans­form the way you think and act to­wards waste,” Cuffy-Young ex­plained.

As Siel En­vi­ron­ment marks ten years this year, she has ex­pand­ed to have two full-time mem­bers work with her.

The or­gan­i­sa­tion is now com­plete­ly fo­cused on food and or­gan­ic waste. Their last waste char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion study in­di­cat­ed that food and or­gan­ic waste ac­count for 32.4 per cent of all na­tion­al waste which is the high­est per­cent­age of waste we gen­er­ate in this coun­try.

Cuffy-Young ex­plained, “We em­barked on a full ecosys­tem pro­gramme where we help or­gan­i­sa­tions mea­sure, mon­i­tor and man­age their food waste. We help gov­ern­ments de­vel­op food waste poli­cies which can be­come leg­is­la­tion so that food waste man­age­ment be­comes manda­to­ry. We al­so deal with the ed­i­ble parts of food where we try to do­nate those or col­lab­o­rate where we can get food and sell ed­i­ble prod­ucts to the peo­ple who need it.”

They are now the on­ly ac­cred­it­ed food waste pre­ven­tion con­sul­tants with the pledge on food waste in the Caribbean re­gion.

It’s a third-par­ty cer­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­gramme where Cuffy-Young and her team as­sess a busi­ness’s food waste prac­tices and award an in­ter­na­tion­al­ly recog­nised cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. This cer­ti­fi­ca­tion can be dis­played on the com­pa­ny’s web­site and staff uni­forms, “al­low­ing them to at­tract eco-con­scious con­sumers”.

The 43-year-old would al­so cham­pi­on a pro­gramme ti­tled, “Doh waste good food”.

She ex­plained the essence of the pro­gramme, say­ing, “We want­ed peo­ple to re­alise that their first line of de­fence, ac­cord­ing to the food waste hi­er­ar­chy, is to re­duce food waste. Then to feed peo­ple be­cause we have so many peo­ple in this coun­try and by ex­ten­sion the Caribbean re­gion who are hun­gry, and to feed an­i­mals.”

Cuffy-Young’s life­long dri­ve to ed­u­cate cit­i­zens on prop­er waste man­age­ment con­tin­ues. How­ev­er, she in­sists it must be done strate­gi­cal­ly.

She said, “Ed­u­ca­tion is an on­go­ing thing. I think what we have done in the past is we present peo­ple with in­for­ma­tion and that’s very dif­fer­ent than ed­u­ca­tion. If you’re ed­u­cat­ing peo­ple, that ties in­to not just in­creas­ing their knowl­edge base but al­so chang­ing their be­hav­iour.”

She said for too long the fo­cus has been on giv­ing peo­ple too much in­for­ma­tion, but it has on­ly con­fused them.

The Tu­na­puna na­tive re­mains com­mit­ted to ed­u­cat­ing the pub­lic on prop­er waste man­age­ment and the con­se­quences of poor dis­pos­al. While there is still a long way to go, she’s proud of how far she’s come since that life-chang­ing en­counter at age 11.

She wel­comes any­one pas­sion­ate about prop­er waste man­age­ment to join her mis­sion—but on­ly if they share her gen­uine com­mit­ment, be­cause Sian Cuffy-Young is se­ri­ous about mak­ing T&T a clean­er place.