Drink a beer, save a shark

What’s Hot Magazine
March 12, 2012

  

The Cayman Islands Brewery has a long history with involvement in green initiatives in the Cayman Islands. From the outset the company aimed to adhere to best practices when it came to limiting its impact on the environment, from limiting pollution to promoting recycling.

It recycles Caybrew bottles, which are washed and sterilised before being reused, limiting the number of bottles that end up going to the dump. It also collects aluminium cans for recycling, while the spent grains from the brewing process is used by local farmers to supplement the diet of their livestock.

One of the more recent initiatives was the involvement of the brewery’s latest brand, White Tip Lager, with conservation efforts in the Cayman Islands. Although the packaging of the beer depicts the shark species for which it is named, all species of shark stand to benefit from the sale of the beer, as a percentage of each sales goes towards the Department of Environment’s shark conservation programme.  Read the whole story here.

Earth Day poster contest scheduled

Caymanian Compass
March 6, 2012

The National Trust for the Cayman Islands is urging students to get their entries in for the annual Earth Day poster competition.

The competition asks students to design a poster reflecting environmental issues that are important to them, in keeping with the 2012 Earth Day theme “Every Day is Earth Day.”

Entries are invited from students in primary school, middle school and high school age categories and prizes will be awarded to the top design in each category, as well as to the overall winning design. The winning design will be used to promote Earth Day 2012 activities taking place throughout April.

“Any art materials and media can be used including paint, textiles and collage materials, photography and computer graphics,” said Christina McTaggart, general manager of the Trust.  Read the whole story here.

DoT partners with eco-tourism site

Caymanian Compass
February 28, 2012

The Cayman Islands Department of Tourism in Europe has partnered with leading eco-tourism portal responsibletravel.com to give the islands’ accommodation and nature based attractions the opportunity to showcase its products to environmentally-aware travellers from the UK – at no or minimal cost to operators.

The site was started up more than 10 years ago by The Body Shop’s Justin Francis and founder Anita Roddick and is now the world’s leading provider of ‘green’ holidays, with 350,000 visitors a month and an active database of 150,000. The site also provides its members with valuable marketing support and ultimately will be directing site visitors to make enquiries and bookings direct to operation owners in Cayman.  

An online Insiders’ Guide has been developed for the site, written by leading dive and travel writer Tim Ecott, a regular visitor to the islands, revealing Cayman’s wealth of accommodation, nature-based tours and attractions. Read the whole story here.

Diving into harbour cleanup

Caymanian Compass
January 26, 2012

High school students are taking up scuba and diving into Cayman’s waters while also doing their bit for the environment.

Clifton Hunter High School teacher Hamish Hamilton and 16-year-old student Joseph Burey, armed with trash bags and scuba gear, headed underwater near the wreck of the Cali in George Town harbour Tuesday to pick up litter and spruce up the popular dive and snorkelling site.

The cleanup is part of an initiative to teach school students to dive and to give back to the community at the same time.

Mr. Hamilton, who is a certified dive instructor who teaches his own students and members of the High Schools Dive Club to scuba dive, hopes to do a similar cleanup with more students at the Lobster Pot dive shop soon.

“We’re certifying students to dive and getting Caymanian kids into the water, which hardly any of them do,” said Mr. Hamilton, as he and Joseph suited up outside Divers Down dive shop, which provided free air tanks and weights for Tuesday’s dive.  Read whole story here.

Bodden Town landfill not new choice

cayCompass
Patrick Brendel | patrick.brendel@cfp.ky

A group of citizens organised in opposition to the proposed Bodden Town district landfill want to know why their area was picked for the new solid waste facility. Specifically, the Dart Group-owned site is between Bodden Town and Breakers, near two quarries and the Midland Acres subdivision.

“How was Midland Acres chosen as the site for a new dump, and where is the assessment of the consequences of the dump on the people of our district?” said Vincent Frederick, spokesman for the Coalition to Keep Bodden Town Dump Free.

The coalition also questions what happened to the waste-to-energy proposal to clean up the George Town Landfill while creating electricity. Bodden Town MLA Mark Scotland said previous strategies to address the landfill were simply not affordable.

“The dump is the most serious environmental issue facing our country today. Solutions have eluded successive governments primarily because of the cost,” he said.

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The New Story of Stuff: Can We Consume Less?

Yale Environment 360

November 28, 2011

Will rich societies start consuming less? Could wealth go green? Might parsimony become the new luxury? Heresy, surely, you would say. But it might just be possible.

Take Britain. A new study finds that the country that invented the industrial revolution two centuries ago reached “peak stuff” between 2001 and 2003. In the past decade, Britain has been consuming less water, building materials, paper, food (especially meat), cars, textiles, fertilizers and much else. Travel is down; so is energy production. The country produces less waste, too.

This analysis is not the product of data juggling by a free-market think tank. The author of the study is Chris Goodall, a fully-paid-up environmental activist and parliamentary candidate for Britain’s Green Party, but also a stat guzzler who once worked for McKinsey & Company. His books include How to Live a Low-Carbon Life.

The stats hold true even when you allow for the ecological footprint from the manufacture of imported goods. And, while the decline in resource use in Britain has accelerated since the economic crisis in 2008, the trend started long before the banking crisis. There was a decline in overall materials use of 4 percent between 2000 and 2007. So it cannot be attributed entirely to recession, and can be expected to survive economic recovery. Read the whole story here.