 The use of the circular economy is being regarded as a pertinent tool in St Lucia's national development. A panel discussion held Monday as part of Productivity Awareness Week 2021 highlighted the model's usefulness to sustainable development. The circular economy promotes recycling and reuse of existing materials for as long as possible. This serves as a sustainable means of addressing global issues, such as climate change and pollution. Sustainable development and environment officer in the Ministry of Education, Sustainable Development, Innovation, Science, Technology and Vocational Training, Ginele Volney explained an aspect of the circular economy is sustainable production and consumption. As part of sustainable consumption and production, we look at ways in which we would be able to re-envision our resources and look for the best way to be efficient for our economy. Sustainable consumption and production is stemmed also within the Sustainable Development Goals, Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development. Now sustainable development looks at satisfying the needs of the current generation without compromising the needs of our future generation. It looks at the environment, it looks at our people and the decisions that we make to ensure a sustainable development and prosperous economy. There are three dimensions in sustainable development that is the social, economic and environment. And the circular economy helps us satisfy the environment section of sustainable development. Ms Volney said that the Department of Sustainable Development is working to achieve efficient consumption and production through various measures including the Styrofoam and Plastic Food Service Container Prohibition Act, which bans the importation of Styrofoam and selected single-use plastics. This reduces the quantity of plastic waste, which currently makes up 22% of 33,000 tons of St. Lucia's annual domestic waste. Laurie Anna's Les Flores Acting General Manager of the Solid Waste Management Authority provided an analysis of waste disposal and recycling in St. Lucia. We did a waste characterization the last time in 2019 and what we found out was the organic portion of that waste collected from the households which is about, like I said, 43,000 tons is approximately 45%. So 45% of households, well, households dispose of 45% of organics in the waste. The next highest component in that waste is plastics which is 22%. And all of that waste eventually finds its way to the landfills. We have an issue in terms of waste management. The recycling sector is informal sector. It is not developed in St. Lucia and this is one of the challenges. For persons who do not know recycling, recycling waste costs a lot of money and as a matter of fact in most developed countries recycling is actually paid for or subsidized by governments. Unfortunately in St. Lucia, because of our fiscal position, government cannot put in money into recycling and this is actually primarily led by the private sector. One of the initiatives established in St. Lucia that promotes the recycling of plastics is the Replast OECS Recycling Project.