JET’s plastic garbage tallying well under way

The Jamaica Environment Trust (JET) is reporting that its tallying of data from International Coastal Clean-up (ICC) Day Jamaica 2019 is well under way.

Since ICC Day took place on Saturday, September 21, eighty-six of the 140 local clean-up coordinators have submitted data to JET for 135 of the 180 sites registered for ICC Jamaica this year.

JET is the national coordinator for ICC in Jamaica, and its 2019 flagship ICC event at the Palisadoes Go-Kart Track is among the sites for which data has been already been tallied. At that clean-up, 2,019 volunteers collected 1,466 bags of garbage weighing approximately 22,000 pounds.

“As national coordinator of ICC in Jamaica, hosting our annual beach clean-up is only one aspect of the project,” said Tamoy Singh Clarke, JET’s programme director.

“We are also responsible for registering all the ICC events that take place across Jamaica each year, training the local site coordinators in data collection and clean-up procedures and then following up the data, which was collected at the clean-ups after ICC Day.”

Clarke explained that tallying data from Jamaican ICC sites typically continues until the end of November each year.

Data from Jamaica’s ICC sites will be submitted by JET to the global coordinators of the event, the US-based NGO Ocean Conservancy. In Jamaica, ICC is also supported by the Tourism Enhancement Fund and Recycling Partners of Jamaica – the two main project donors – and several other sponsors from corporate Jamaica. Once all ICC data for Jamaica has been tallied, a national summary report will be prepared by JET and published in January 2020.

“We are very interested to see whether Jamaica’s plastic ban will have an impact on the islandwide statistics from ICC activities this year,” said Clarke. “The data from JET’s clean-up site at the go-kart track, the largest in the island, shows a decline in the number of scandal bags our volunteers collected when compared to last year – from 4,604 in 2018 to 3,047 in 2019,” she continued.

Results from ICC and other similar global clean-up initiatives have been a vital tool in advocacy efforts towards the development of national policies that address waste composition, like Jamaica’s ban on single-use plastic grocery bags, straws, and imported Styrofoam. Plastic bottles continued to be the number-one item collected by volunteers at the JET clean-up site in 2019.