Not serious about recycling

There — and in many other cities I have not visited — people are serious about recycling.

They don’t just throw all their garbage in a bag and toss it out the door like we do. They divide their garbage into paper, plastic and other.

The garbage collectors won’t take your plastic if it’s mixed in with other garbage.

In Seattle, you’re even expected to compost your food. Someone in Seattle told me it was going to be against the law soon to throw your food in the garbage.

Restaurants and hotels in Seattle and Nashville had recycling bins everywhere. Ice cream stores even found ways to help the environment.

One ice cream store I visited in Nashville had stainless steel tasting spoons instead of those miniscule plastic ones. They looked quite nice with their long handles, and it felt much more elegant to hold one of these spoons than those tiny plastic ones.

Can you imagine how many plastic, ice-cream tasting spoons get dumped every day? The Seattle-based coffee shop Starbucks has been progressive for some time. It sells glass or reusable plastic cups for frappuccinos and reusable coffee cups in elegant designs for patrons.

My daughter, Ijanaya, takes her Starbucks cups everywhere in Trinidad.

She won’t buy from places that don’t allow her to use her reusable cup. She even carries glass containers to restaurants for take-out food. She tries not to buy food from people who don’t allow her to use her own glass bowls.

The Chinese restaurant in West Mall is most supportive of her take-away bowls.

The good news is that here in Trinidad and Tobago there are many environmentally-conscious people like Ijanaya who have turned their mothers’ kitchens into recycling centres, and I’m noticing some creative endeavours in offices and business places.

When I recently visited endodontist Dr Jason Warner’s office in Port-of-Spain, I noted real hand towels, neatly folded on a shelf in the bathroom. Patients use a hand towel and put it in a special bin to wash. Dr Warner’s office also had tea cups and saucers for patients to use in the waiting room.

One Port-of-Spain restaurant, Youthful Vegan, emails receipts to customers. Starlight Pharmacy in Maraval has separate bins for plastic, glass and garbage.

We need to come up with more creative ways of saving our environment — especially ways to package take-out food.

In Seattle, you can’t use Styrofoam.

It’s banned. Customers get biodegradable paper containers for their food.

I just don’t get why more people in the food industry aren’t realising the importance of using biodegradable material for takeout or why they aren’t pushing reusable containers with restaurants’ logos on them.

It would be like free advertising.

Government needs to ban the use of Styrofoam, and everyone can help the environment by using reusable water bottles.

That’s a good start.

We need to show we care about the environment, and we care about the future. We need to do our part — especially considering that we are starring on some Internet stories as one of the worst abusers of plastic in the world.

That’s not good for a tiny little island like us.

Not good at all.