Carnival - the aftermath

Hope Road, Kingston. 6.15am, 8 April 2024

I woke up early this morning to go walking and confronted the waste left by Carnival yesterday, on Hope Road at least. This comes up most years – why can’t there be a road crew to clean up behind the revellers?  Why can’t there be bins? And the responses are also predictable – there will be the inevitable comment broad-brushing of Jamaicans as ‘nasty people’. There will be a release from the organizers that the mess will be cleaned up today. Rinse and repeat.

About two weeks ago, I did a radio interview on beach access. Again, inevitably, there was the question from one of the hosts about the mess Jamaicans would likely make of any open access beach - who would pay the expense of clean up? The other guest on the interview was Dr Devon Taylor of the Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movement (JaBBEM) and we both rejected the ‘nasty people’ narrative. But it is also true that Jamaica has a problem with littering. It’s evident everywhere you go and occurs at every level of the society.

I’ve had endless close encounters with litter and the dumping of waste – indeed, the use of the Palisadoes strip as a garbage dump was a main impetus for my environmental life. Starting in 1992 with the Jamaica Environment Trust’s (JET) first beach clean up (11 or 16 people attended, depending on which record is consulted, and continuing until my retirement in 2017, at which point beach clean ups were held at 147 sites islandwide, with a turnout of over 9,000 volunteers. JET has continued to organize beach clean ups, and so have many other people and groups. It has become A Thing. But I have seen Jamaicans return from three hours of collecting and counting litter, sweaty and exhausted, to throw away the packaging of whatever drink or snack they were consuming right beside them on the same beach. I have seen them discard waste on the ground next to an empty bin. I have often asked why, as gently as possible, and been greeted with a shrug. It was just normal behaviour. Someone would clean up after them.

During JET’s anti litter campaign, Nuh Dutty Up Jamaica, we conducted focus groups to understand the attitudes underlying the treatment of waste. Some of the things we were told were:

·       Littering creates jobs. Very often people know who will get the job to clean up. In a very real way, littering is perceived as a civic act of care for unemployed people.

·       Cleaning up garbage is a low status job and if I clean up, I too am low status.

·       If I take my garbage with me, and that is noticed, it is possible I could be ridiculed as being a ‘garbage man/woman’.

·       The gullies are there to take garbage – the parish councils told us so. (This last is apparently true, according to a member of the St James Parish Council, on a tour of Montego Bay’s South Gully in 2016. ‘But when we told them that,’ he explained, ‘it was mostly organic waste that was put in gullies. Our waste stream has completely changed.’

·       The cultural difference between ‘yard’ and ‘street’. Yard is the responsibility of those who live in the yard – street is the responsibility of the government.

·       There is an ‘away’ to take garbage to. The gullies do that, so do the garbage trucks. And ‘away’ is out of sight and out of mind.

·       There’s nowhere to put garbage – few bins, skips are overflowing, collection is erratic and infrequent. Unless the government fixes that, littering will continue.

·       There’s no enforcement of anti-litter laws – no one takes them seriously.

·       The drivers of public transportation vehicles will not allow passengers to bring waste with them.

·       Most people had received anti-litter education at school but observed that these principles were not adhered to in the wider society, so the conclusion was the waste rules were just for school.

In short, the problem of littering is multi-faceted. But it is not going to be solved if we pretend that it doesn’t exist.

To the Carnival organizers, I say this: a clean up afterwards reinforces the view that littering is someone else’s problem. Provide options to dispose of the waste you know is  going to be generated – you are a profit-making enterprise and the cost of litter prevention should not be externalized onto the rest of the society. Use the opportunity to encourage better waste management behaviour.

This morning, I imagined being part of the crew tasked with picking up all that was left on Hope Road – the feathers, glitter, glass, bits of costumes, plastic bottles and bags, fast food containers crawling with ants, cardboard. I thought of the waste – so much used once and then thrown away. Later, at about 9.30am, I saw crews sweeping up and bagging the Carnival leavings in the most heavily trafficked areas. But I bet the side roads won’t get the same treatment.  

(I’m in the final edit stages of my new novel, A HOUSE FOR MISS PAULINE, due out early 2025. Hence the silence… soon be back..)