Nationwide consultations begin for single-use plastics ban

Efforts to ban single-use plastics in Guyana are currently moving at a fast pace, as the Solid Waste Department is currently working on initiatives to eliminate these plastics from the environment.
Single-use plastics are those common everyday items which are made of plastic and are disposed of after being used once. The most common ones are bags, straws, and bottles.
Speaking with Guyana Times, Solid Waste Director Walter Narine stated that a nationwide consultation has begun to engage the public on discussions relating to the ban. After this phase is completed, Cabinet will be engaged to determine if a bill will be passed for the ban to be imposed.
“After the consultations, they’ll take the $15 million, which is the estimation to go back to Cabinet and if it’s all favourable, then they would roll out the legislations and regulations and put them in place,” Narine said.
He added that while those consultations were ongoing, the Solid Waste Department would be involved in activities during the Mayor and City Council (M&CC) “City Week”, whereby the public will be educated on the dangerous hazards these plastics pose to the environment.
“What we’re doing is that we have the health fair as an event at “City Week”. There, we’ll be promoting reusable items instead of plastics and we have some education programmes as to the dangers of plastics on the environment and humans,” he explained.
Furthermore at the municipality level, a waste preparation pilot project is scheduled to commence during the first week of this month, which will give persons in various communities the opportunity to compost their waste. Waste separation will also be part of the activities.
“We’ll be continuing on our part from that aspect and from the municipality part, we’re going to be rolling out a waste preparation pilot project where we will identify a community to do the preparation of waste for storage in the household,” the Solid Waste Director said.
“So, we’re hoping to give each household in the designated communities a receptacle that they can put their waste in and we’re also going to teach the community members there how to do composting. Once they learn how to do composting and they already separate that waste, then they can take that waste to do compost, which will be beneficial to them and to us because that would be less waste,” he added.
In the month of June, World Environment Day was observed under the theme “Beat Plastic Pollution: If you can’t reuse it, refuse it” to raise awareness on pollution related to harmful materials which are disposed of in the environment.
During that time, the Minister of State, Joseph Harmon had also announced that steps had been introduced to tackle the scourge of plastic-based pollution.