Feathers, beads, and fabric flood the streets during Carnival Monday and Tuesday, but once the Greatest Show on Earth ends, many of the costumes end up in landfills, never to be used again.
One organisation, Carnicycle, is taking up the mantle of rewriting the narrative of Carnival through a more sustainable and eco-friendly route.
Formed in November 2018 as the first social enterprise to recycle Carnival costumes in the world, Carnicycle assists in bridging the gap between Carnival culture and sustainability while raising awareness of a deeper issue that needs to be addressed.
According to Co-Founder and CEO Danii Mcletchie, Carnicycle is giving discarded costumes a new home for a fraction of the original cost.
“Most of the costumes and most of the fabric that is used in Carnival are polyester. Polyester is a form of plastic, the gems itself, some are really tiny, and when they’re fragmented, they could turn into microplastic. When those things are discarded on the streets of Port of Spain and end up going into the drains, going into our seas eventually, then they end up going into our fish, so we’re contaminating our ecosystem by the way costumes are currently even created by just being made with hot glue, and when they end up on the floor, they enter into the drains and can contaminate our oceans.”
The production of a single costume bra alone can generate nearly 37.7 kilogrammes of CO₂. Ms. Mcletchie says her business is single-handedly reducing our nation’s carbon footprint.
“When we decided to pivot to Carnival, we realised that most of the opportunity at the time was in Trinidad, so although we wanted to initially start a business in Tobago, that national Carnival in Trinidad was much bigger and had much more waste than Tobago’s.”
Ms. Mcletchie even walked us through the recycling process.
“We first start off by collecting the costumes, whether partnering with hotels like Hyatt, Courtyard Marriott or Brix, or we partner with a mas band to have a lunch stop, a rest stop on the road where we collect costumes from masqueraders and so after we collect it, we bring it back to our warehouse, and we pay people locally to kind of strip the costumes for us, stripping them of their beads, and feathers and things of that nature. Then we go through a sorting process where we sort the costumes or the feathers and beads by size, colour and shape, then we will clean them, and we will package them and resell them.”
No longer does this have to be a one-man job. Ms. Mcletchie says that making Carnival sustainable can be as easy as discarding used costumes in recycling bins along rest stops.
“Typically, we put out a recycling map on Instagram a week before Carnival. This year we will be recycling at Hyatt, Courtyard Marriott by MovieTowne, and then also by The Brix. Additionally, we will be recycling at Spirit rest stop.”
She says that we can collectively create innovative ways of advancing the overall goal toward sustainability and eco-friendly alternatives within the Caribbean, with one example inspired by the Notting Hill Carnival.
“We’re the birthplace of Carnival, but Carnivals outside of Trinidad and Tobago have already implemented eco-friendly initiatives. For instance, Notting Hill Carnival they’ve used the waste generated from Carnival to go to their incineration plant, which ends up making fuel to power homes. They also have initiatives like handicap music trucks so people who have accessibility issues can go on the music trucks, and then there are also solar-powered and eco-friendly music trucks as well.”