The aim of the contest is to invite families and individuals to create projects out of household trash into something useful.
Ten participants trooped to PICRC on Wednesday to showcase their products. Artists and environmentalists — from stay-at-home mom to kids and individuals — brought their creations for judging, which included hats and bags from grocery bags, slippers from old clothes, picture frames from soda cans, car coasters from cardboards, arranging boards from driftwoods and bamboo sticks, among others.
“The whole idea is to educate the public on what we can do as a community to lessen our trash,” Carol Emaurois, Head of Environmental Education of PICRC said in an interview. “It is our social responsibility to be able to work together to produce something out of trash that we can use in our homes.”
The dumpsite, she said, used to be a mangrove area. Now it’s been replaced by this dumpsite where all mangroves are dead and the fish gone. “We’re saying we need to rethink our actions. And for doing that we can save the biodiversity and also lessen our energy consumption and manage our waste.”
She added that all of our energy sometimes go into thinking how to manage the trash that we produce everyday. “We should think about how we produce the trash and be smart and reuse what we have until we can’t really use it anymore and extend the life of these products so they don’t go directly to the garbage can,” Emaurois said.
Most people out there can’t make hats or slippers out of trash, but Emaurois said they can do simple things such as bringing their own shopping bags to the grocery stores or bringing their own water container to work and just refill them instead of buying bottled water.
Surangel and WCTC refund 10 cents from your grocery bill every time you bring your own bags to shop.
Palau does not have a recycling facility. “What we have is just for taking and managing the trash,” Emaurois said. So people should do little things to help decrease the amount of trash that we produce everyday.
“This is the first time that we’ve done this recycling fair,” Emaurois said. “We want to make it an annual thing. Next time we will give the public enough time to prepare.”
The judges — composed of Maynard Elewel and Madonna Olkeriil from Koror State Solid Waste Management, Yalap Yalap from Palau Conservation Society and Setsuko Matsumoto of Japan International Cooperation Agency — will reveal the winners today at the PICRC office.
First prize is $200 cash and 20 lbs compost soil, 2nd prize is $150 cash and 15 lbs compost oil, and 3rd prize is $100 cash and 15 lbs compost soil. The entries are open for school and public viewing today at 9:00 to 1:00pm at PICRC.
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