KEVON FELMINE

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

Af­ter 23 years of re­tail busi­ness in T&T, PriceS­mart Mem­ber­ship Club has in­vest­ed US$3.7 mil­lion to di­ver­si­fy its port­fo­lio with a ven­ture in­to man­u­fac­tur­ing.

The multi­na­tion­al com­pa­ny’s de­ci­sion to man­u­fac­ture en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly biodegrad­able pack­ag­ing for its prod­ucts was a de­ci­sion Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley laud­ed as he cut the rib­bon to the new fa­cil­i­ty at the Point Lisas Busi­ness Park yes­ter­day.

Com­ing from his Diego Mar­tin West Con­stituen­cy, Row­ley said he was pleased with the plant as all the garbage from west­ern Port-of-Spain drifts along the coast and wash­es up at Cha­cachacare.

He said de­spite clean­ing the is­land, it con­tin­ues to pile up be­cause peo­ple use too many non-degrad­able plas­tic prod­ucts, and the en­vi­ron­ment suf­fers as a con­se­quence.
“This plant is such a bril­liant idea and is wel­comed by the peo­ple, sup­port­ed by the Gov­ern­ment of T&T. We look for­ward to these biodegrad­able items to hold food and oth­er things, and we know that we will be do­ing sev­er­al things,” Row­ley said.

He said the Gov­ern­ment wel­comes the in­vest­ment, and the coun­try needs the jobs.

It will al­so grow ex­ports and is a thrust to en­sure cit­i­zens are not smoth­ered by their garbage.

The 30,000 sq ft Sus­tain­able So­lu­tions Plant us­es bio-resin that un­der­goes ex­tru­sion and ther­mo­form­ing to cre­ate 31 prod­ucts PriceS­mart will use to pack­age meat.

Tra­di­tion­al­ly, the com­pa­ny, like most, im­port­ed sty­ro­foam, a ma­jor en­vi­ron­men­tal pol­lu­tant. How­ev­er, ex­ec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent Brud Drach­man ex­plained that the new trays are home com­postable.

“What I mean by that is you put it in your yard, and 200 days or less, it will com­post to its orig­i­nal or­gan­ic form, so there is no plas­tic, no mi­croplas­tics, and it does not re­quire any spe­cial gen­er­a­tion of heat or bac­te­ria to com­post,” Drach­man said.

An­oth­er prod­uct is re­cy­cled PET (Poly­eth­yl­ene tereph­tha­late) used to make trans­par­ent cov­ers for cakes.

Drach­man said some are al­ready in the Ch­agua­nas branch.

PriceS­mart leased the fa­cil­i­ty from Edan K Prop­er­ties Ltd in Feb­ru­ary 2022, im­port­ing equip­ment from Chi­na, in­stalling fix­tures and test­ing op­er­a­tions with­in 10 months.

The plant will ini­tial­ly ser­vice PriceS­mart’s four lo­ca­tions in T&T and, in time, ex­port to its oth­er 46 over­seas.

There are cur­rent­ly 15 em­ploy­ees.

With pro­duc­tion ex­pect­ed to in­crease, the plant may re­quire an­oth­er 10-15 work­ers.

Min­is­ter of Trade and In­vest­ment Paula Gopee-Scoon said the ven­ture helps to re­de­fine the pri­vate sec­tor’s role as a dri­ver and part­ner in sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment.

Gopee-Scoon said im­port da­ta for 2018-2022 showed ap­prox­i­mate­ly $41 mil­lion in im­ports in one tar­iff line of food pack­ag­ing and con­tain­ers.

Of this fig­ure, around $20 mil­lion rep­re­sent­ed sty­ro­foam tray im­ports for meat pack­ing.

She said the plant would help to sig­nif­i­cant­ly re­duce T&T’s im­ports of trays, plates, cut­lery, cups, and food con­tain­ers while pre­serv­ing for­eign ex­change.

“I am pleased to note that this plant will cut PriceS­mart’s car­bon diox­ide us­age by 50 per cent (7,749.2 tonnes of CO2) ver­sus that of a con­ven­tion­al plas­tic plant op­er­a­tion,” she said.