St Kitts and Nevis to ban single-use plastics

St. Kitts and Nevis, the two-island nation that is quickly becoming a popular Caribbean cruise destination, has announced plans to ban single-use plastics in the near future.

The island, which thrives on the tourism that its natural beauties both on land and in its waters possess, will follow in the footsteps of other Caribbean islands like Jamaica, Dominica, Barbados and Turks & Caicos in eliminating all single-use plastics from the island.

The announcement shouldn’t come as a surprise to residents of St. Kitts and Nevis; the islands’ Ministry of Tourism and Sustainable Destination Council, which had been created in 2013, began advocating for the ban of single-use plastics in 2018, beginning a campaign called “Plastics Be Gone,” which aims to reduce St. Kitts and Nevis’ single-use plastics by 30 percent over five years.

It also started an annual initiative called Plastic Free July, advocating residents and businesses not to use single-use plastics during the month while educating them on the ways plastics can threaten the health of the world.

In April 2021, the two-island nation’s Department of Environment began consultations with stakeholders in a series of sessions entitled, “Are you Ready to be Plastic Free?” Representatives from government departments, the Small Business Development Centre, Solid Waste Management Corporation and Ital Creations attended the sessions.

This year, the private sector will be included in the conversation surrounding the plan of action to ban single-use plastics entirely.

“The Ministry of Environment is consulting with relevant stakeholders to implement a ban on single-use plastics, following in the footsteps of several Caribbean countries that have already done so,” said Sharon Rattan, St Kitts and Nevis’ Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Environment and Cooperatives.

“One of the things that the ministry is endeavoring to do is to make sure we have meaningful collaboration so that we can make informed decisions because we are quite aware that such a ban cannot be done overnight,” added Permanent Secretary Rattan.

The islands are also using some of the funds from its Citizen by Investment Program to fund its sustainability initiatives, including its ban on single-use plastics. The program allows sustainably-minded individuals with capital to earn citizenship in the islands by investing in their development, including in their sustainability.

According to UNEP, the world produces about 300 million tons of plastic each year, though Statista has found that just 8.7 percent of the volume of plastic waste generated each year in the United States alone was recycled, indicating that the majority of plastics created get thrown out into landfills, where they can take thousands of years to degrade and risk critical ecosystems.

St. Kitts and Nevis has a special problem with single-use plastics because of its geography. The two islands only have so much land, and many single-use plastics are not recyclable, taking thousands of years to degrade. Large landfills filled with mainly plastics are not sustainable over the long run, and neither are the threats of these plastics to the islands’ natural wildlife.