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.

Read more...

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.

DoE celebrates gold medal beer

Caymanian Compass

December 21, 2011

The Cayman Islands Brewery’s latest addition to their lineup, White Tip Lager, recently was crowned the best lager at the Caribbean Rum and Beer Festival in Barbados.  

This is the second year running that the brewery takes the crown, as CayLight won the title in 2010. This year, it had to settle for second place behind White Tip. Ironshore Bock also took silver in the category for strong beers.

“With three international judges blind tasting 30 beers, that is quite impressive for us,” said James Mansfield of Cayman Islands Brewery. “Next time that we go to the brewers’ convention it will be interesting to see what they think of us now, as we are still only 4 1/2 years old, compared to other breweries like Banks Barbados, which is 45 years old.”

A unique aspect of White Tip Lager is that a percentage of the sales goes to the Department of Environment’s shark conservation programmes.

 

“The actual link-up with the Department of Environment was unique, and we will be cutting the first cheque in January,” Mr. Mansfield said. Read the whole story here.

Fishing ban extended for the Nassau Grouper

BYM Marine Environment News
December 17, 2011

Dr. Guy Harvey applauds decision but says more needs to be done.

A groundswell of public support generated by Guy Harvey¹s latest film The Mystery of the Grouper Moon has prompted the Marine Conservation Board of the Cayman Islands to extend a ban on fishing the Nassau grouper spawning aggregation site near Little Cayman.

The Board, this week, voted to extend the current moratorium another eight years after reviewing extensive research conducted by REEF (Reef Environmental Education Foundation) and Oregon State University and a public education campaign supported by the Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation (GHOF) and the Cayman Islands Department of Environment (DOE). The existing ban, in place since 2003, was due to expire at the end of the year. The penalty for catching Nassau grouper in a spawning aggregation site between November and March is up to one year in prison or up to $500,000 in fines.

"The Cayman Islands are celebrating the 25 anniversary since the formation of the first marine park here, so it is fitting that such a strong conservation effort has been made by the MCB and that common sense has prevailed," said Dr. Harvey.

In filming the research work being conducted by REEF, Guy Harvey and award-winning filmmaker George Schellenger created a compelling and informative 45-minute documentary The Mystery of the Grouper Moon. The film's purpose was to document the research and make the results available in layman's language to the residents of the Cayman Islands. The documentary (for a preview go to http://www.guyharvey.com/home.php?id=5) was shot entirely in the Cayman Islands and was supported by REEF and the DOE. The GHOF also supported the education campaign with custom artwork.

 

More work, however, needs to be done, according to Dr. Harvey, an internationally celebrated marine artist and a professor of marine biology, who makes his home in the Cayman Islands.  See the whole story here.

Plastic-free Saturdays begin

Caymanian Compass
December 7, 2011

Beginning this weekend, every second Saturday of each month will be plastic bag-free days in the Cayman Islands. 

Last year, local supermarkets replaced their nondegradable plastic shopping bags with biodegradable alternatives and started charging 5 cents per shopping bags in a bid to cut down on the number of bags ending up in Cayman’s landfill. 

That first phase of the Cayman BECOME campaign brought an initial reduction of as much as 80 per cent in the number of plastic bags sold in supermarkets. Prior to that, an estimated 12 million plastic bags were being disposed of every year in Grand Cayman. 

Now the Corporate Green Team Network is embarking on the next phase to cut down on the amount of plastic finding its way to Mount Trashmore.

Starting this Saturday, 10 December, on every second Saturday of every month, supermarkets will not hand out any plastic shopping bags, in a bid to encourage shoppers to either bring their own bags from home or purchase environmentally-friendly, re-usable bags. Read the whole story here.