 Hello, and welcome to Issues and Answers, a production of the Government Information Service. I'm your host for today, Geraldine Beset-Joseph. Today we are joined by a representative from one of the island's leading resorts, and that is actually Tikai Resort and SPAR, as part of the Business Month activities. Mr. Nick Pinnock, who is our guest today, is actually here to highlight the practices used within his respective organization in relation to energy efficiency plans, and the work carried out thus far on the path to a plastic-free environment. So first of all, before we even start, thank you for joining us here today. Thanks for having me. Okay, brilliant. So first of all, can you tell me about, just provide me actually with a brief description of your company and the operations of the resort? Sure. Well, Tikai Resort and SPAR is located halfway down the west coast of St. Lucia. We're a 33-room boutique hotel, two restaurants, SPAR, dive shop. We have a great wine cellar. And just roughly about 100 employees, so it gives you an idea of the size of the business. Okay, brilliant. Now, I know that your company now deals with environmentally friendly and eco-friendly food service containers. What made, what was it that your company, why did your company decide to switch rather, to using these kind of containers? Well, I think it was a decision that I made some time ago, and I wanted to implement a lot more environmental practices at the hotel, because mainly of the type of business we're in. We are in tourism, and we have to showcase our island, and that is the main attraction. It's really the island, and then secondary, in my view, is the actual place, the resort that you're going to be staying at. So yes, it's done somewhat as a feel-good policy internally. But also I felt that we really needed to be the change that we wanted to see on the island. I've been talking about this for a long time with other hoteliers and in the industry itself, and I felt that what better way to really implement change other than leadership by example, really. So we researched where we could find those containers and switched over. It was actually quite easy and seamless. Okay. Yeah. Brilliant. So what biodegradable and compostable food service containers do you actually utilize within your resort? Well, the main one I wanted to get rid of were drinking straws, and there were two types of drinking straws that I see being used at bars here. Typically, they're the little red straws, which they seem to use as drink stirrers, which I just never understood. I actually use bamboo, the coffee stirrers instead for that now, which work just fine, and those are made from wood. And the drinking straws, so we use the compostable drinking straws now, which really do look just like the plastic ones, except they dissolve very quickly and break down into harmless earthy components, basically. So those are the two main ones, but we also have people who sometimes want takeaway meals. So we've also got rid of the styrofoam clamshell containers and also the drinking cup containers now, and all of those now are biodegradable compostable. Okay. Now, you said earlier that the switch actually was an easy one to make, but in saying that, was it easy to source the containers then? It wasn't at first, but like most things, you can pretty much get everything you want on Amazon. So for the first go around, we did actually bring in our own stuff, and we got rid of all the rest, and that's what we're doing now. But since then, I've actually been able to home in on local suppliers and distributors who are also rising to the call and are importing biodegradable compostable containers. So our second go around, we've been sort of seeing who locally can supply it. And we've found some very good prices, very competitive prices, almost in some cases the same as what the plastic ones were. Okay. Brilliant. Well, can you give us some information now about how you actually would go about actually composting the containers that you actually have, that you use within your world now? I mean, if you have the space on your property, ours is very large, and we do have composting sites. Mainly has been typically for waste, like leftover food and stuff like that. That typically is what you would normally compost. The takeaway containers, while they can be composted, and we probably could compost them in our compost piles, but those were mainly bought because of my care for their fate after they leave my possession. Especially with the take, they are takeaway containers, so when you use them, you're giving them to somebody else and they're leaving the property with them. You have no control where they end up afterwards. So you may as well just assume the worst, and the worst would be it's going to end up on the side of the road or it's going to end up in a drain somewhere, and with the compostable ones, they will not cause a problem, unless there are a lot of them, then there would be a short-term problem obviously. So it's not a replacement for, by no means encouraging people to throw things on the side of the road, but at least if one does get away, at least we know it's not going to be causing an environmental problem afterwards. So that is really our take on it and why we've switched. Well this is a fascinating topic to me. We have to just take a break just for a short while, so please stay tuned and join us again after the break. The world's climate is changing, and that affects all of us. Storms are becoming increasingly intense, periods of intense drought and heavy rain stress farm animals and destroy our crops. Higher average ocean temperatures kill our coral reefs and change the migratory patterns of fish. St. Lucia contributes only 0.0015% of global greenhouse gas emissions, but is doing its part along with countries around the world to reduce the emissions that are warming our world and changing our climate. These efforts are called mitigation, but decades of emissions have already changed the climate and the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere today will increase average global temperatures even more. We need to adapt, that is, do everything we can to prepare for and respond to the actual and expected negative effects of climate change and everyone has a role to play. We need to protect our crops, build homes that withstand storms and keep our drains and waterways free of garbage to help us recover or bounce back from climatic events. Learn more about the Government of St. Lucia's National Adaptation Plan and the steps you can take to protect yourself and your fellow St. Lucia's. Welcome back to Issues and Answers, I am Jolene Beset-Joseph. I'm joined today by the manager of Tikai Resort and Spa, Mr Nick Pinnock. Now Mr Pinnock, before we went to break, you were telling me a little bit about the containers and your hope that they are being disposed in a positive way and such likes. However, let's look at more the business aspect of the property. Can you see there's a correlation at all between the positive environmental practices that are now being implemented within the resort and maybe economic benefits to the resort? That's a good question. I think that the benefits would have to be something that you may have to stoke and push along yourselves in that you would want to normally shout about your green practices. Some hotels have also applied to institutions such as Green Globe and whatnot and when they get to a certain standard of greenness they get the permission to put the emblem or the logo on their website which tells visiting people onto the website that these people are environmentally conscious and they have a certain level of green practices. There is that, obviously. I don't think it's yet quite at a stage where it trumps price and service and whatnot. You're not going to stay in a hotel you're not comfortable in just because it's got a green global war for instance. For us it's more of a long-term view. I've taken a long-term view. I shudder every time there's a huge rainfall and just in Castry's harbor you see the water has washed out and you feel like you could almost walk across the harbor sometimes on these floating plastic containers and it ends up on the coastal beaches. We're trying to portray St. Lucia as a beautiful destination so why would we do that if this is happening? To me it's more of a destination view, a very long-term and I would wish that all hotels and all users would now start demanding these sorts of containers and we can see the single-use plastics be phased out very quickly. As you said you've got environmentally sustainable operating procedures now within the property. How have employees actually come to embrace the new practices? Well I just want to jump in here and say that the containers moving from single-use plastics to biodegradable containers is not the only environmental practice that we've had to institute at the hotel. That one is quite easily implemented because it's basically from one day to the next you go from this brand to that brand and it's very easy to do. There are however other practices that we have which take a little doing because people actually have to be the ones implementing them or caring for the systems to make sure that they're kept up. We're a medium-sized business so we're still at that level where we all interact with each other very closely and things can get monitored very closely and whatnot. So we've had a high degree of success internally. It might be different for a larger organization to implement certain practices and have all employees embrace it at the same time. So hopefully I think we've managed the sidestep a lot of those challenges just by proper communication and sort of getting the staff on board through dialogue and getting by and really. Okay. Well this is a very interesting topic as I was saying and a very important one. But can you actually tell me what other eco-friendly activities do you actually engage in? Goodness. We've done a lot of insulating. That's a very big one. We still have a lot more to do. We've retrofitted a lot of our air conditioners on property to more energy-saving ACs, inverter-type ACs. We have a little bit of solar power as well, not only water but electricity as well. We've retrofitted all the entire resort with LED bulbs. So fortunately we have an electricity bill to tell us how all of our energy efforts are going because you get a numerical result afterwards and you can actually see it. There are also amenities in the rooms as well for instance. You've probably seen in a lot of hotel rooms either real life or on TV. They usually have these little tubes where the shampoos and the lotions come in. We've moved away from all of those now and we have our own pump bottles in the showers and bathrooms and we refill those with stuff that we buy in bulk basically. So I would think that that pretty much rounds it up. I might have missed a couple but we're doing a lot and you're not going to see anything like Green Globe on our website. Maybe one day I will apply to one of these institutions and get sort of the green recognition that a lot of people want to have on their website now. But for now we're really doing it just because we think it's necessary and we really want other people to follow suit. All right brilliant. Well sadly we have run out of time however. It has been such an interesting conversation but thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. And thank you also for joining the National Television Network. Do stay tuned but however right now from Issues Nonsense, we say bye-bye.