September 2015 Issue Business View Caribbean

62 September 2015 - Business View Caribbean hopeful. “But these problems are going to be solved in the not-too-distant future,” he believes. “There are many people working on this problem, world-wide. There are technologies in the U.S. that successfully takes comingled plastics and make boards and pallets out of them. That industry has been around for a while in the U.S.” Quesnel points to a company called JET Recycling America, Inc. a Nevada-based business that uses a proprietary technology to transform virtually all forms and grades of plastic waste, comingled and re- gardless of contamination, directly into valuable, 100 percent recycled products. According to Quesnel, even though Trinidad is a small country, between 50 and 60 million plastic bottles are disposed of into the waste system, every month. He believes that a big part of the problem is that his fel- low citizens are not well-educated about the need and benefits of recycling. “We do not have the proper edu- cational material out in the schools and in the general media,” he says. “But I’m going to continue trying to get good sense to prevail; to get my country to accept that recycling is necessary - not only of plastics, but of all the other recycle-friendly materials. We have to treat waste as a potential income and not just taking it to the dump and waste disposal areas, loading more dirt on top of it and thinking it will go away. It’s not go- ing to go away. We have to deal with it.”