TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums St. Maarten - St. Martin Plastic ban 'in place' but not enforced

Probably take forever to start enforcement.

I always feel guilty throwing out the Styrofoam takeaway containers!! I still don't understand why some coffee shops use Styrofoam cups?? The coffee tastes nasty, you can't reheat the cups and it just wrong to use them! "IMHO"!

Enforcement and implementation is going to take a very long time, one could feel the vibe in the article already.

This makes me thing of the BVI several years ago. They decided to make all BVI waters discharge-free; which meant that the black water tanks on all the boats (charter and private). They actually enacted the law regarding prohibiting dumping. To date, there is not a single pump-out facility in the BVI; originally they had dreams of pump-out boats in several locations. So there's now a law on the books but it cannot or won't be enforced because of commercial interests and inept planning. Sort of like this plastic ban; the infrastructure to replace plastic packaging isn't there yet.

And weren't we just discussing the dumping of all that sargassum into plastic bags and then into the dump?

Yup.

It would be much more beneficial if the Dutch side established a comprehensive recycling program with collection containers widely distributed. Imagine how much glass and aluminum gets dumped in the Pondfill dump. Glass has no recycling value, but if it was crushed before dumping a lot of space would be saved. The natives seem not to grasp the benefits.

Bluesfan--glass is not recycled here in my county either. Literally the ONLY thing that is recycled here is aluminum cans.

We have Glass, Paper, Plastic and Aluminum recycling in our county. Works weel but not all people conform to it.

As of June 1, the French side is also supposed to be no discharge, but there's only 1 pumpout inconveniently located on the fuel dock at Fort Louis Marina.

@Ritchard - are you sure about that pump-out in Fort Louis? I was at the fuel dock a couple of weeks ago (2 hours, in fact - and when they opened they told me that they had no fuel!) and didn't see a thing.