We’re fairly tree-huggy over at my day job at MEP Publishers. Over the last few years, we’ve slowly moved closer and closer to being as green a publishing company as one can be in Trinidad and Tobago. We donate as many working electronic items as we can to schools and nonprofits. We’ve recycled paper for several years with ACE Recycling (and used “draft” mode and printed on both sides as much as possible). We try to keep run the airconditioning as tepidly as possible. We’ve switched to using printing partners for our books and magazines that use more sustainable materials (paper, ink, machinery) and processes (literally saving millions of pages of paper each year).

Piranha: recycling beacon

And now, through a partnership with Piranha International – the only company in Trinidad, as far as I know, that handles virtually every form of recyclable and e-waste – we can now extend that to recycling glass, plastics, aluminium, e-waste and more.

Piranha is a company that people probably have read about in the newspapers, as they’ve formed several partnerships with other local businesses – Plastikeep, Guardian Holdings, the Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival, Brian MacFarlane, the Tourism Development Company, and others.

So, with Piranha, we’re delighted to finally have created a system for preventing our various waste products from ending up in a landfill. It also saves our staff members from having to take their recyclables to numerous different places in trying to be ecologically responsible. Even for someone who gets as excited by recycling as I do, the ritual was becoming a bit tiresome.

A longer verion of this post can be found on on the MEP Publishers website.