La Mode Verte
Environmental Awareness Through Media ProductionsArchive for Price Waterhouse Coopers
Mass Shoe Tree Pin-Up and the PWC Cleanup
Last week was a busy week for LMV director Ed Scott-Clarke. On Friday, Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) were kind enough to allow Ed to film a cleanup they were organising along the mangrove coast of northwest Cayman. PWC have a progressive community volunteering programme that encourages its employees to help out in a selection of locally orientated projects. Barkers, as the area is known, is not the worst place on the island for beach debris, but it is still affected and there are little to no government organised initiatives to clear it. This, sadly, is the case for most of the islands outside the normal tourist route. About ten employees, headed by Tim O’Sullivan, attended the cleanup that ran on for three hours. By the time Ed left after an hour, four large bin-bags worth of trash had been recovered and a long stretch of beach covered. It was great to see a company based on the island taking it upon themselves to help out in this area. As we have written about before on this blog, governmental attitudes towards marine debris do not reflect the importance of Cayman’s beaches to its economy. Several tourists that LMV has interviewed since being over here have expressed their dismay about how polluted the beaches are on island as soon as you walk beyond the manicured shores of the hotels and restaurants.
Because of this, Ed, with the help of the Department of the Environment’s Ollie Dubock, his film-maker brother Chris, and local bar-girl Jen Roy went up to Grand Cayman’s North Shore to collect shoes for a mass pin-up on the Cayman Island Shoe Tree. Within 20 minutes, the four had found close to 200 flip-flops and documented just how bad the Caribbean marine debris problem was (see pictures). Yesterday (Sunday 13th), with the help of the Cayman Island Brewery and local journalists, these 200 flip-flops were pinned to the tree. Messages were written on several shoes gave statistics about marine pollution in the hope that tourists passing by will stop and think properly about our use of disposable plastics.
