Earth Today | ‘Sea the change’

AS THE world continues to grapple with pollution as one of the key contributors to the triple planetary crisis – alongside climate change and nature loss – some Jamaicans are doing their bit for the cause.

This is evidenced by the annual organisation of International Coastal Clean-up (ICC) Day activities, led by the Jamaica Environment Trust (JET), which recently announced that registration for 2024 is now open.

“Groups must register with JET to be a site coordinator. Registration closes July 26, 2024. Clean-ups can also be done on the Sunday after ICC Day,” noted Justin Saunders, JET’s programme director, in a recent news release from the entity.

“If you do not want to host your own clean-up, you can volunteer for JET’s flagship clean-up, but registration for this does not open until August 26, 2024, and then closes September 9, 2024,” he added.

ICC 2024 is set for September 21, with primary support to come from the Tourism Enhancement Fund and the Ocean Conservancy.

Since 1986, ICC has seen the mobilisation of people, locally and globally, who work together to rid beaches and waterways of trash. Well over 17 million volunteers from more than 150 countries have collected over 350 million pounds of trash in its 38 years.

In Jamaica, JET has coordinated ICC Day since 2008, with the support of the thousands of volunteers who continue to turn out each year at clean-up sites islandwide; and with good results. In 2023, for example, 6,859 volunteers from 106 groups collected 78,704 pounds of garbage from 106.98 miles of coastline across 183 clean-ups in all 14 parishes.

ICC Day 2024 retains the ‘Sea the Change’ theme from last year, with a special focus on plastic foam, commonly known as Styrofoam, which is frequently found on beaches and in waterways.

“While beach clean-ups alone do not solve the problem, removing thousands of pounds of garbage from our coastlines during clean-ups significantly reduces the waste entering our marine environment, protecting fisheries, coral reefs, and marine ecosystems,” noted JET Chief Executive Officer Dr Theresa Rodriguez-Moodie.

“Additionally, although plastic foam food containers and cups are no longer a major issue here in Jamaica, plastic foam pieces still rank among the top five items collected on ICC Day,” she added.

Meanwhile, the value of the annual ICC efforts is put into context by findings from a 2023 report of the United Nations Environment Programme, which lends insight into the pollution problem, with a focus on plastics.

Titled Turning off the tap: How the world can end plastic pollution and create a circular economy, the report references the scale of the problem – where some 430 million metric tons of plastics are produced annually, two-thirds of which are so called “short-lived products” that “soon become waste, and a growing amount after one single use”.

The situation, the report said, requires a systems change and champions three things – referred to as ‘market shifts’ – that must be done to achieve a circular economy that gives careful attention to plastics production and use – from cradle to grave.

They include reuse, recycle and reorient and diversify, “shaping the market for plastic alternatives to enable sustainable substitutions, thus avoiding replacing plastic products with alternatives that displace rather than reduce impacts”.

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