The Ja­maica gov­ern­ment says a ban will be im­posed on the use of plas­tic lunch box­es, ef­fec­tive De­cem­ber 31, this year, as ef­forts con­tin­ue to shift to more sus­tain­able op­tions.

Min­is­ter With­out Port­fo­lio in the Min­istry of Eco­nom­ic Growth and Job Cre­ation, Matthew Samu­da, said that the elim­i­na­tion of lunch box­es will rep­re­sent an ex­ten­sion of the ex­ist­ing ban on sin­gle-use plas­tic items that was im­ple­ment­ed in 2019.

“We made the ini­tial change as it re­lat­ed to Sty­ro­foam; there was a wave of re­cy­cled pa­per al­ter­na­tives in the mar­ket then. Ob­vi­ous­ly, smart busi­ness­men found an­oth­er plas­tic so­lu­tion that I would say went around the pol­i­cy in­tent,” he added.

Samu­da said that with the ex­ten­sion of the banned items, the in­ten­tion is to “close that loop­hole, be­cause it was cer­tain­ly not in­tend­ed (for Sty­ro­foam) to be re­placed by Poly­eth­yl­ene tereph­tha­late (PET)”.

While PET is a bet­ter ma­te­r­i­al com­pared to Sty­ro­foam, it is still not the most suit­able ma­te­r­i­al to be used.

“We want re­cy­cled pa­per-based so­lu­tions as our lunch box­es,” said Samu­da, not­ing that to help al­le­vi­ate some of the sol­id waste is­sues af­fect­ing Ja­maica, the ban will al­so in­clude per­son­al care prod­ucts that have mi­croplas­tics in them.

“There are some skews or vari­ants of de­odor­ants and fa­cial soaps that have plas­tic beads in them that are dele­te­ri­ous to hu­man and ma­rine health. There is no sewage-based sys­tem on Earth that would ex­tract these plas­tic beads be­fore they are put out in­to the en­vi­ron­ment. So, we are look­ing at the items that can be re­moved from our waste stream,” Samu­da said.

“Every step to­wards en­vi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion and restora­tion, where need­ed, is a good step to­wards Vi­sion 2030 and, prac­ti­cal­ly, it is a step to­wards us not hav­ing to ex­plain to our chil­dren, in an em­bar­rassed man­ner when we are old­er, why we didn’t take par­tic­u­lar steps,” he added.

KINGSTON, Ja­maica, May 24, CMC