Earth Today | UWI spotlights plastic ban at public forum
Published:Thursday | January 31, 2019 | 12:00 AM
WITH SOME Jamaicans still scrambling to adjust to the phased ban on plastic packaging containers, including single-use plastic bags, the University of the West Indies (UWI) is today to examine the science behind the initiative.
That examination will take place at a public forum hosted by the UWI departments of life sciences and chemistry, as part of an ongoing public lecture series of the Faculty of Science and Technology that looks at emergent and topical issues in the public’s interest.
Professor Mona Webber, director of the Centre for Marine Sciences, said given the scale of the plastic pollution challenge, there is no question of the value of the ban and of today’s lecture, intended to help people understand what is at stake.
“Jamaica produces some 650 million plastic bottles per year. Ten per cent is recycled and they say 30 per cent actually remains in the environment because the material takes between 450 and 1,000 years to biodegrade. Any plastic items we have used in our lifetime and (which) our grandparents have used is (therefore) still here today, somewhere,” she noted.
“It is also a frightening phenomenon how much plastic there is in the sea and how much of a problem it is. It is durable, it is light and so it is easily transported by water and can move through the ocean very easily. So we worry about landfills and it getting into the atmosphere, but marine scientists, over the past decade, have become extremely alarmed at the amount of plastics in the sea,” added Webber, herself a marine biologist and ecologist with more than a quarter of a century of research and teaching experience.
It is this and other information, including implications for human health, the professor said, that will be shared later today to help those members of the public in attendance make sense of the plastics challenge and to contextualise the ban.
“It (the ban) might be a nuisance, but people must understand why we needed to do this – to reduce our dependence on and use of single-use plastics,” noted Webber, who is among the list of speakers for today’s forum.
In addition to ‘Plastics and the Environment’, which Webber will address, other subjects to be covered at the forum include ‘Jamaica’s Ban on Plastics’, ‘The Nature of Plastics’, and ‘The Ban on Plastics: A Global Perspective’. Speakers include representatives from the Caribbean Policy Research Institute, the UWI Department of Chemistry and the National Environment and Planning Agency.
The ban on plastics affects not only single-use plastic bags, but also packaging made wholly or in part of expanded polystyrene foam or drinking straws made wholly or in part of polyethylene or polypropylene, manufactured for single use.
It became effective on January 1 this year, making it illegal for any person “to manufacture or use any single-use plastic in commercial quantities”, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Authority (Plastic Packaging Materials Prohibition) Order 2018.
Also as at January 1 this year, “no person shall import or distribute any single-use plastic in commercial quantities”, according to the Trade (Plastic Packaging Materials Prohibition) Order 2018.
To go against either order is to risk conviction and a fine not exceeding $50,000 or imprisonment of up to two years in the case of the Natural Resources Conservation Authority Order, and a fine of up to $2 million or up to two years behind bars in the case of the Trade Order.