Lee An­na Ma­haraj

leean­na.ma­haraj@guardian.co.tt

MP for Ma­yaro, Rush­ton Paray, is call­ing on cor­po­rate bod­ies to take more re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for sus­tain­ing the en­vi­ron­ment.

Paray was speak­ing at the beach clean-up in Ma­yaro on Sun­day, in ho­n­our of World En­vi­ron­ment Day.

The clean up, which was or­gan­ised by Trinidad Ce­ment Lim­it­ed (TCL) and Fly­ing Tree En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment, had a turnout of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 100 peo­ple.

“I would like to see greater par­tic­i­pa­tion from our cor­po­rate en­ti­ties like TCL, in terms of their re­search and da­ta analy­sis to help the State. When we have cor­po­rate part­ners bring­ing their en­er­gies and ef­fort to Ma­yaro here, it sends a very strong sig­nal to the rest of the coun­try on how im­por­tant the is­sue on cli­mate change and en­vi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion is to us here in the coun­try,” Paray said.

“These are com­mu­ni­ties that strad­dle the coast­line of the Ma­yaro con­stituen­cy, and based on the in­ter­na­tion­al tem­per­a­ture warn­ings that we are giv­en, if noth­ing hap­pens, we can have one me­tre of sea rise with­in the next 50 years ... We have to take se­vere ac­tion. We have signed in­to the 2013 Paris Ac­cord, leg­isla­tive­ly I think we are be­hind time, we’re not do­ing it fast enough to be able to get where we want to be,” he said.

Fran­cis­co Aguillera, the Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor of TCL, was al­so in at­ten­dance and said the dri­ve was part of the com­pa­ny’s sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment project.

“Our dream is to be able to use some of this waste and ac­tu­al­ly put it in­to our man­u­fac­tur­ing process. So, this is the first step we are tak­ing to­wards ac­tu­al­ly achiev­ing that goal,” he said.