BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – PLASTIC containers and bottles strewn across St. Kitts are not only unsightly and having a major impact upon the environment, but also demonstrate a decline in health and social values, one waste management official has stated.
Though the Operations Supervisor at the Solid Waste Management Corporation (SWMC), Wilmon McCall, has often received praises from visitors that St. Kitts is a “clean” island compared to some of its neighbours, he told SKNVibes in a recent interview that the island, particularly in the Basseterre area, “could be a lot better than it is”.
“Solid Waste Management is concerned with the litter situation in St. Kitts in general and Basseterre in particular. The increasing litter situation is worrying in the sense that we think we need to reduce the amount of waste we have in the first place and we need to get people to dispose of their waste in a manner that is legal,” he said.
The problem is not something that is new to St. Kitts, but has become exponentially exacerbated by the number of street vendors selling take-away food, McCall stated.
“I have always advocated that buying food and walking while eating it is not healthy. I’ve also said that one of the problems we suffer from as a result of that is an increase in the litter situation in Basseterre.”
“Walking and eating is never recommended,” St. Kitts-Nevis Chief Medical Officer Dr. Patrick Martin said in a previous interview with SKNVibes. “When a person walks and eats they do not take the proper time to chew their food and this leads to several problems.
“Most commonly, people ‘have a gas’, or indigestion, when they eat too fast. This can be extremely uncomfortable for the person, and I have even seen people with indigestion go to the hospital because they believed they were having a heart attack,” he said.
Additionally, the fatty and carbohydrate rich foods sold by many street vendors can lead to an increase in diabetes, hyper-tension and heart disease if consumed excessively.
With non-biodegradable litter filling empty lots and hidden nooks in the Basseterre area at a much faster rate than SWMC employees can clean it up, McCall said he is seeing a disturbing social trend emerging in addition to the health and environmental concerns he has.
“We have to ask what brings us together as a family. In my opinion, hunger can bring us together… but these side bars in some way take away the ability for us to be together because you can just go and buy a cheap five dollar food down the street in a Styrofoam container and then you cast it on the ground when you’re done.”
Without a chance to gather around the dinner table and socialize, McCall said he believes youths are growing increasingly distant from the family unit and are thus more prone to engage in deviant activities.
“In my opinion, a lot of youths have gone astray recently because they are not being raised in a situation that is conducive to their proper development. The vagrancy and ‘bad boy’ attitude that we seem to have is because families fail to come together.
“You don’t have to come with your mother and father to sit and eat with them anymore. It has some major social implications in my view,” McCall stated.
The SWMC official added that he has been made aware of some families who no longer wash dishes in their homes, but rather eat all of their meals out or off of plastic plates and dining ware. It is changing the mindset of living a disposable lifestyle that McCall says is a daily challenge.
“I am trying to sensitize people to what their habits are bringing about in our country. In my view, I believe that homes and schools are the way to go to educate, but recently the family is taking such a flogging that one wonders if we are really getting through.”
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