POF and CIS students fill up 18 bags of beach trash
(CNS): Grade 2 students from Cayman International School (CIS) took part in a beach clean-up at Safe Haven hosted by Protect Our Future (POF) last Thursday to mark World Oceans Day and to highlight the problem of single-use plastics in the Cayman Islands. As the country waits for the details of a proposed ban on eight single-use items promised by the premier, the young students helped to pick up 18 bags of trash, most of it plastics and microplastics.
POF member Evie Sweetman noted the huge amount of plastic on Cayman’s beaches, much of it everyday single-use items, such as cutlery, bottles and takeaway cups. “These are some of the most common items polluting our shores and endangering our wildlife, and they come from all over our islands.”
Cayman is one of the few countries in the Caribbean that still has no restrictions on plastics and Evie said the POF members were delighted about government plans to change that. Noting that groups like Plastic Free Cayman have been pushing for a ban since 2017, she said this would have a significant impact on the amount of plastic ending up in the sea and on the beaches.
“With the incoming plastic ban, Cayman has the potential to turn the tides on our plastic problem and move forward into a brighter and more sustainable future,” Evie said.
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Category: Environmental Health, Health, Land Habitat, Science & Nature
The argument of all of this plastic being moved from the beach into the dump making the cleanup pointless is missing two major points. The first being that the cleanup serves to help move plastic as marine debris from harming the reefs and aquatic animals that are in Cayman’s waters. The animals that we all love to eat and are a major part of our culture. While moving it to the dump isn’t the best resolution, it is the only one present on our island.
The second argument about these children having misguided hearts or cleaning dart’s land should should then fall back on to the other school’s of the island. I don’t see any large scale movements of kids at the public schools cleaning government land. At least these kids are trying to do something good for their home.
What a nasty bunch of small minded, selfish comments.
Well done kids that’s brilliant. Ignore the losers.
Dart have an obligation to tend their properties, and they don’t. Grade 2 kids shouldn’t have to intervene to pick up the slack for land barons, just as they aren’t sent around Forum Lane to empty office waste bins. That would be ridiculous, as is this. It is the same.
All that is local.
Wow so many negative comments for a positive community orientated activity. I didn’t realise I was surrounded by so many trolls.
Well done kids, great job.
If the younguns marched on the CIG building and demanded a ban on roundup chemicals (Glyphosate) they’d really be doing something to help themselves and the planet.
Then they could march on CIG building again and demand Cayman become a non-gmo territory.
GMO bro has entered the chat. Watch out, seed oils!
I stopped doing these when I realized how dumb I looked picking up plastic which washes right back up and placing it into PLASTIC bags which was then deposited on the landfill.
But yea, landfill space is unlimited and you gotta virtue signal and feel good about yourselves, I get it.
Do You prefer to wait until you literally drown in garbage?
So by that logic the garbage collectors look stupid picking up the garbage from your house each week as another bag just appears the following week.
that’s some powerful thinking there.
Apples to limestone.
It’s a whole different scenario for trash collectors to keep a community sanitary than to have people collect endless plastic from ironshore in the middle of no where, or even more laughable, in front of million/billionaire’s beachfront property for free.
In the long history of idiotic posts on CNS you should be proud that for once you came first in something. Sure just leave trash on the floor. Dear god.
You look far dumber post this nonsense on CNS than you ever did helping out the environment a little bit.
So nice to see all those CIS students cleaning up Dart’s property for him. Hopefully he will have a bit of money in the near future to actually pay them, or someone else, to clean it up.
What happens if they get pricked by a glass shard or a contaminated needle? Hope they dont tho
Bravo. Well done.
Training the next generation of garbage men and women.
Very little of the trash washing up on our coasts originates from domestic single use plastic. These are two entirely separate problems. If POF can’t grasp the nuance, then their straw man fallacy undermines the legitimacy of their cries for banning single use. We should certainly want to reduce the dioxin and PCB leachate fuel going into our unlined dump on those merits. But it’s a very different issue than foreign gully-dumping, and oceanic microplastics, where we cannot domestically legislate any improvement.
Reading this after I dump used motor oil onto the ground behind tbe shop again today.
The vast majority of out flotsam obviously comes from Haiti, in particular all the water pouches that anyone who has done a beach cleanup will be familiar with. Further on shore is our local stuff, typically polystyrene containers and straws which are too clean to have floated here but that’s a tiny fraction of our beach trash.
The property formerly called SafeHaven is long gone, and hasn’t existed on the registry in that name for 12 years. It’s been called Dragon Bay since 2011, and on the books of DART since it ceased being Crown lease land from around August 2016. Meaning it is not a public park to clean up by kids. It is private property, with signage, and garaged tractors across the street. DART needs to hire estate managers and start paying to maintain their own lands, and easements, or forfeit that land back to the crown.
So in effect Dart gets free child labour. In other jurisdictions this is criminal.
So you are advocating for the unfettered public access to such lands to cease then?
Not what the poster said. Dart also has a duty to maintain the easements across the land, something they also don’t do, add that to the list.
The general public (including 7 year kids) should not have to regularly mobilize volunteer clean ups for absentee billionaire land barons. Yes, it would clarify ownership of those responsibilities, and prevailing corporate contempt for the public, if these private lands were visibly fenced off like the old Hyatt, or Calicos, or Royal Palms. However, some us can grasp that clarity without seeing a fence, or a middle finger, just from looking at the land register. Private land and easement maintenance is not the public’s duty or responsibility. It was a condition of acquisition. Also true that we fund and equip a no-show Public Works Department for the limited amount of public lands that remain, a separate beef.
Curious, who asked them to?
DART has put the minimum amount of money into Safehaven since they acquired it a few years ago. Safehaven Road and Turnberry Road are in terrible condition and urgently need to be repaved.
DART is not a good corporate citizen and needs to start maintaining the lands they acquired from the CIG.
Pine hurst is a mess of potholes. Dart is trying to scam Crystal Harbour residents into paying to maintain a Dart responsibility.
And these 18 bags of microplastics and rubbish went to the dump instead of being incenerated for electricity generation.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
stop this incineration nonsense….or this rock will be renamed to The Place Where People Go to Get Cancer
When “the experts” can’t tell their a$$es from watermelon….
Google is a good source of information on environmentally safe incenerators.
it is not the INCINERATORS, it is people who will run, monitor, control, maintain the incinerators.
In Japan 🇯🇵 or Netherlands 🇳🇱? Yes! In Cayman 🇰🇾? NOOOOOOOOO
1. There’re NO regulations related to waste incineration
2. There is no expertise to run, monitor, control, maintain the incinerators
3. Incineration is the most expensive way to handle waste
4. Operational costs generally include labor, fuel, and equipment maintenance. Additional expenditures occur during monitoring and compliance for air emissions, wastewater, and ash disposal.
Incinerator operators need to keep improving pollution control equipment in order to comply with emission regulations. Costly upgrades often become a major factor in facility shutdown, as the revenues
are not sufficient to cover the additional expenditure. In the U.S., at least 31 municipal solid waste incinerators closed between 2000 and 2020, largely due to the financial burden caused by necessary pollution control requirements.
Since Cayman doesn’t even have the necessary pollution control regulations. rules and requirements, HOW IN THE WORLD ANYONE WOULD EVEN WANT TO BUILD WtE plant?
Work Permits, bobo
That’s what the ReGen project is. CIG will be paying Dart billions to incinerate our own garbage, so he can sell free power to CUC, who will then mark it up to paying consumers, and politicians will call it renewable and sustainable. The concentrated toxic fly ash will still go in the dump.
Bless them.
And their little misguided hearts.
Let’s hope and pray that those ghastly plastic flowers that litter all of our cemeteries and adjacent properties are the first to be banned.
And it will all be back there by next week.
so what? we live in times when cleaning up beaches from plastic is new NORMAL.
True that.
Pass the rum.