Close The Loop Caribbean

Project Partners

Close The Loop Caribbean

Close The Loop Caribbean is a regenerative project and model which focuses on organic waste capture and upcycling at the national levels for the production of high-level ‘microbes-alive’ compost soil, land regeneration and reforestation activities, and the development of other high-value products and services – while developing carbon models around these through the registration and management of projects to generate relevant carbon credit and financing opportunities.

The Close The Loop Caribbean project was developed by IAMovement and Hello Green Ltd, working closely alongside a 3rd key partner Tucana Ltd. The three organizations came together recognizing synergies between their different goals and activities, in an effort to develop sustainable regenerative models in Trinidad & Tobago, as it pertains to organic waste management, healthy-living soil generation (through industrial scale composting), and land rehabilitation and reforestation.

Given IAMovement’s 5-year history working in the rehabilitation of quarries in Trinidad & Tobago, through its past IWEco-TT and Building on Vetiver! projects, with Close The Loop Caribbean, IAMovement’s goal was to develop a model to allow for sustainable, expanding and ongoing rehabilitation and reforestation activities in T&T. A key input for these activities learned over the years was organic matter in large, bulk amounts, for the development of organic matter on barren lands, and regeneration of topsoil.

Hello Green Ltd was the first company in the Caribbean to introduce certified compostable packaging in 2016, and since then has been driving both its uptake and use, as well as the discussion at the citizen and national-public level on the damaging effects of petro-chemical based styrofoam and single-use plastics on our environments and ecosystems, while making the case for plant based packaging options instead. These conversations led to recognition that Trinidad & Tobago was in need of an industrial scale composting facility, to help manage the very large quantities of organic waste entering our nation’s landfills (estimated 45% of total volumes), as well as to process plant-based compostable packaging which has been introduced and is slowly growing in use amongst the population – as an alternative to the detrimental single-use plastics and styrofoam which have been globally recognized to having a very harmful effect on our natural environments, in-land water bodies and seas.

Tucana Ltd is a company which has been pioneering industrial scale mushroom production and now serves Trinidad & Tobago with 2,000 kg of oyster mushrooms per month, with these numbers set to rise in both this mushroom variety and others, as it also aims to develop its product offerings both locally and for export. Mushroom production yields a very high-quality waste product as an input for composting, which is mycelium-rich straw, in similar volumes and weights to sellable mushrooms produced. Accordingly, and given key R&D which they had also undertaken in a ‘microbes-alive’ approach to composting, Tucana positioned itself well to develop high-level composting capabilities in a significant way.

Where these 3 partners recognized the synergies between their interest and work with organic waste, and desire to develop healthy living soils while supporting other valuable downstream activities such as reforestation, and eventually organic agriculture; a 4th partner was also recognized and introduced in the early stages of Close The Loop Caribbean – Thompson’s Garden Materials Ltd. With Thompson’s 20-years of practicing composting and soil generation in an industrial way, utilizing top-class equipment such as some of the most powerful tree and woody waste-material shredders currently available – but where they lacked certain scientific expertise at the microbial level, a valuable synergy between Tucana and Thompsons was recognized, and in-turn with Close The Loop Caribbean as well.

These organizations as a consortium have thus worked closely together over the last 2-years to develop a ‘closed-loop’ regenerative model which is ever expanding and evolving, but which is now poised to consolidate its organic waste management and composting activities at a single site in north-central Trinidad, while reforestation activities through IAMovement, and another consortium partner Vetiver TT EES Ltd continue to grow at the National Quarries Company Ltd sand and gravel site in Sangre Grande.

A key R&D element which was built into the Close The Loop project is also allowing the involved entities to explore the development of new, value-added products with different organic wastes, which are in some ways linked to existing activities, or were seen as low-hanging fruit opportunities worthy of study along the way. These include: Black Soldier Fly (BSF), animal feed production, sargassum seaweed as an input for land regeneration and composting, or other derivatives, paper and plant based packaging, and tackling another key national issue which entails a resulting organic waste product – namely African snail infestations.

Where Close The Loop Caribbean was born of work by an environmentally-focused NGO and several environmentally and socially conscious social-businesses, and where its core activities revolve around addressing one of the nation’s most significant forms of waste by volume (organics); the CTLC team and group has also thus maintained a general interest in assisting with the formation of sustainable models around the handling and recycling of all forms of waste as well – essentially helping to close the loop on all forms of waste, generally. As such, Close The Loop has formed other strong partnerships in the growing recognized consortium of entities who are working together on this issue, where these include:

Flying Tree Environmental: a leading pioneer in the capture and recycling of waste plastics (in all its forms and types) into other plastic products such as construction grade plastic lumber
Hadco Ltd: A long-standing major company in Trinidad & Tobago with an environmentally conscious mindset, who has accordingly expanded some of its services and sub-companies to include those which offer recycling and upcycling services in an industrial way for paper and cardboard materials, used cooking oils, and soon-to-be rubber vehicle tires as well.

Lastly, given that some of the key project activities which Close The Loop Caribbean supports are carbon sequestering (namely industrial scale composting, and land rehabilitation and reforestation); a last key element which the CTL teams undertook to develop for this project is the registration of carbon projects – where, these projects could accordingly be registered for the development of carbon credits, which could be sold on the local and international markets, to serve as a green financing mechanism to feed funds back into the projects themselves, and/or other relevant regenerative CTL activities.

The process of doing this has also led Close The Loop Caribbean Ltd, the company, to position itself as an entity which could assist other projects with carbon registration, and carbon credit development. This has opened the doors for a 3rd project to potentially also be registered under the current project activities, which is currently being explored; and this is the protection and conservation of the forests of the Northern Range of Trinidad, through potential formation of protected natural reserve(s) there.

While Close The Loop Caribbean is a project which was formed by a group of independent, well-established, green and regenerative focused entities – the private social-enterprise Close The Loop Caribbean Ltd was also formed to serve as the sustainable vehicle and mechanism through carrying these activities forward, and helping to serve as a key convening and facilitating stakeholder beyond the project period. Close The Loop Caribbean Ltd thus has a range of value-proposition offerings which includes both elements of the different activities outlined above, as well as others which are related and have been born over time, which are expanded on below and can also be viewed on the CTLC website here.

The Close The Loop Caribbean project is currently funded through a mix of grant and loan finance provided by the European Union and IDB Lab’s Shaping the Future of Innovation (STFOI) facility, and IDB Lab through their regional BlueTech Challenge Facility.

Provided below is a summary overview of the Close The Loop Caribbean private company as it operates today:

Close The Loop Caribbean Limited is a private company and consortium representing several partner organizations who have become recognized leading entities in the local and regional space as it pertains to climate change, carbon offsets, community education and
empowerment, and soil-water-land regeneration activities.

Close The Loop’s core partners are implementing key projects and programmes in T&T and the Caribbean which are focused on land regeneration, reforestation, and food security through novel bio-tech approaches to bring scalable organic agriculture to T&T and the Caribbean – CTL’s direct oversight, design and management of significant and scalable projects in the carbon-offset and impact space have positioned it to establish one of the region’s first carbon offset verification and certification companies.

CTL provides on the ground, technical, networking and added-impact opportunities for its collaboration partners who work alongside to develop a variety of circular economy solutions such as: