MESSY AFFAIR

THERE HAS been a 22-year delay in drafting “critical” regulations to support the National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA) Act, resulting in a failure in policy to mandate garbage separation.

Added to that, Jamaica’s ban on single-use plastic bags, Styrofoam, and plastic straws has been deemed negligible by opposition members of Parliament’s Public Administration and Appropriations Committee (PAAC).

NSWMA Executive Director Audley Gordon told committee members during yesterday’s meeting that Jamaica continues to lag behind while “plastic remains a clear and present danger” to the environment.

Gordon, who appeared before the committee reviewing a plastic and non-biodegradable solid waste management report, said the country was playing catch-up.

“We should have been far farther along, and this is a collective criticism for us a society. We should be by now separating garbage at source,” he said.

He told committee members that several impediments are behind the stall, but cited the absence of regulations as a key challenge.

“The critical regulations to support the NSWMA Act, which was promulgated in 2001, those critical pieces of regulations are still not in place. That’s 22 years [and] still not in place,” he said.

Plastic accounts for approximately 16.8 per cent of Jamaica’s waste, according to a waste characterisation study produced by the NSWMA, while single-use plastic bags account for 0.03 per cent of overall waste.

An estimated 500,666.93 kilograms of plastic waste is generated daily while, annually, 182,743.43 tonnes are generated. Per capita, 1.09 plastic waste is generated.

Gordon said the NSWMA has been working with approximately 40 communities to practise waste separation.

He said a request has been made for 10 of the next 50 waste-disposal trucks that are to be delivered to be tipper trucks.

“There is no point having people separate their waste and you don’t have the capacity to go and collect the plastic if you’re going to mix it back with the compactable. It defeats the purpose,” he said, adding that there are only five tipper trucks serving the entire island.

Gordon said the additional 10 will not be sufficient to resolve the problem but will help to further expand separation nationally into more communities.

“We must move to a national separation of plastic, and that’s where we’re headed,” he said.

Still, Gordon said more also has to be done in terms of public-education campaigns on waste separation, noting that trucks represent one component of the challenge.

He said if people do not begin to feel a sense of responsibility for the waste they generate, the waste-disposal trucks will not help.

The NSWMA is seeking $375 million for this campaign. The agency’s current budget for public-education campaigns is $20 million.

“As an agency, we know what to do. We’re quite capable were we to be resourced and to get the sort of buy-in from the public,” said Gordon, adding that the agency’s enterprise team is also looking to set up transfer stations.

But opposition members Lisa Hanna, Fitz Jackson, and PAAC Chairman Mikael Phillips poured cold water on Gordon’s mention of the enterprise team and its plan, arguing that they have been hearing of it for more than a decade, with few results to show.

“We don’t seem to be any closer in dealing with waste energy … . Each time that we hear of a new enterprise team, we hear of a new report, but yet still we don’t get to that point where we want to be. It becomes redundant after a while,” said Phillips.

He urged Gordon to identify low-hanging fruits, which will yield immediate results.

Phillips also criticised the Government and the NSWMA, noting that the 2019 ban on single-use plastic bags was not accompanied by a robust public-education campaign.

Phillips said pronouncements were made by doing the fundamentals to do the necessary work to get results.

“At the end of the day we keep on saying we’re not quite there yet, but we don’t put the fundamentals together,” he said.

Jackson said that he was “not hopeful” that the NSWMA and its enterprise team would be able to get to run a successful separation programme, noting that the facts supported this.

“It’s what I call one of those uncomfortable truths. The only way it can change is if we change how we do things. It gives me no comfort to hear about this enterprise team that is going to come out with a report. We’ve been hearing that for 20 years, and your team has been there for four years and nothing,” Jackson asserted.

Hanna, in the meantime, argued that even with the ban on single-use plastic, there is still “too much” plastic waste being generated in the country.

She said that the NSWMA has failed to state how it will solve this other than pointing to legislation and public-education campaigns.

In response, Gordon argued that the NSWMA was in an unusual position of being operators and regulators, splitting its focus.

“The ideal thing is to get the NSWMA into the regulatory stuff. We should not be dabbling the way we are in the operation. It is clear that when the cat came into being that this hybrid of us doing operation whilst being a regulator should have been a short window. Well, it’s a short 22-year window,” he said.

“The quicker we can get the operational side of the agency out of the NSWMA so that we then look at the things that the regulators should be looking at then we’ll be in a better place,” Gordon added.

kimone.francis@gleanerjm.com