I recently heard the CEO of Jamaica Environment Trust (JET) Diana McCaulay on radio. Commenting on the proliferation of garbage (strewn liberally from one end of the island to the other) she observed: “It’s almost like ‘Jamaica Land We Hate’ – not ‘Land We Love.’ Indeed, if we claim to love Jamaica so much, our chests swelling proudly as we sing the National Anthem, then why do we damage and destroy this beautiful land? Why deface it with trash?
“Dutty” garbage – and our nasty habit of throwing it wherever we feel like, for someone else to clear up – is the focus of JET’s “Nuh Dutty Up Jamaica” campaign. A public education initiative aimed at changing people’s behavior is always challenging; it doesn’t happen overnight. But this program points to the individual Jamaican’s responsibility for keeping his surroundings decent and clean. Not just his/her yard, you understand; it’s quite likely that is clean and tidy anyway. But the spaces we share: the beaches, streets, schools, shopping plazas, parks, football fields, and so on. The campaign complements the Clean Coasts Programme, launched in August 2014 – a partnership between the Ministry of Tourism’s Tourism Enhancement Fund (TEF) and JET that aims to clean our tourist areas, on land and underwater. But please – please – let us think about the “non-tourist” areas of Jamaica, too.
Last week, JET also presented the findings of last year’s International Coastal Clean Up Day in Jamaica, which had unprecedented support. Over 7,000 volunteers cleaned up 100 miles of coastline, with the north coast parish of St. Mary coming out on top with fifteen registered cleanup sites. The Coastal Clean Up is an exercise in retrieving waste (mostly plastic) from our beaches – the last chance, the last frontier before it all goes back into the sea. Because everything that we throw away on this little island eventually makes its way down to the sea, sooner or later. Just before the Clean Up Day last year, a group of us circled Kingston Harbour by boat, from Port Royal and back again. It was a shock. Apart from the obvious, stinking pollution of the water, which made some of us nauseous, the amount of solid waste – including, even, computer monitors – was terrifying.
Where did it all come from? How did it get there? How did we get so nasty? We asked each other at the time, but we couldn’t answer that last question.
“Nuh Dutty Up Jamaica” is not a clean-up campaign, McCaulay stresses – that is the difference. It is proactive rather than reactive, aiming to teach (and remind) Jamaicans to dispose of their garbage properly. Let us change our dirty habits! A young man whom I know quite well, the irrepressible Russhaine “Dutty” Berry, creator of the humorous and highly successful “Dutty Berry Show” on social media, is the “Ambassador” for the program (that was a no-brainer, really) and I know he will do a great job. Take a look at his video, which made us laugh ourselves silly (I especially like his goat impersonation): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOKC3-tkKGc
Minister of Tourism Dr. Wykeham McNeill is enthusiastic about the project; he know it makes sense from his Ministry’s perspective. The Ministry has funded the Clean Coasts Programme (which is a one-year pilot, hopefully to be extended) in full. The Tourism Enhancement Fund has also given J$350 million to the National Solid Waste Management Agency, he pointed out; these funds come from contributions to airline tickets bought outside Jamaica. He commended TEF Chairman Senator Noel Sloley as a “driving force” behind the programme. Good for them!
The private sector came on board, too. Island Grill CEO Thalia Lyn was there to talk about her (truly Jamaican) fast food company’s new Earth Friendly Box. Diane Ashton Smith from Diageo/Red Stripe was there to pledge her firm’s support through branding bins, running ads and social media promotions. Agricultural Chemicals handed over one of their large branded bins (I hope they will be emptied regularly) to be distributed island wide. And since it’s nearly that time again in Jamaica, Bacchanal Jamaica will also be promoting the program during Carnival events. This kind of support is commendable. Let’s have even more.
We often talk about inner-city areas (where there is often no garbage collection at all, not even a skip to put one’s waste in) and decry the residents’ filthy habits, throwing their rubbish into gullies, etc. But don’t be fooled. Uptown Jamaicans are just as bad – and they don’t have the valid excuse of no proper services. They have their garbage collected. Down the road from our house lives a well-known “big man.” He has a nice big house. Manicured lawns, swaying palm trees, beautifully swept driveway. And yet, a foot or two from his grand front gate is a pile of rotting food and household waste, spilling from a plastic bag that has been dragged down the road by street dogs or a hungry homeless person. It stinks. Flies and mosquitoes breed in it.
Would this pillar of society want to have this bag of filth on his lawn? No, of course not. But it is on the sidewalk, so those sweating, dirty garbage collectors who rattle down our street once a week can scoop it up. Meanwhile, he drives in and out of his gate in his very nice clean car without a second glance. Sometimes, our neighbors might send out a helper or a gardener to tidy up the sidewalk in front of their houses. Sometimes. They would never do it themselves. It’s for someone else to deal with. They are not touching it. Not their responsibility.
This attitude – uptown, downtown, seaside, mountainside, wherever – has got to change. As someone commented last week, “It is not about morality or ethics, but our very survival.”
Petchary's Blog 
Thanks, ‘Blue Aventurine’. Issues are issues and should not be about personalities. I respect the writer as someone who tries to educate and inform and is ready to take my views on board, even if we disagree. 🙂
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Great conversation all. Nice to read a respectable exchanges.
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Thanks so much. It’s a much more complex issue than many Jamaicans think! All the best.
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I think most Jamaicans, your example notwithstanding, do want to live in clean homes. The problem is they think outside – yard – is someone else’s problem. How do you get people to change their minds? You bring up the subject, you talk about it, you get role models to talk about it, you make it funny, you make it cool etc. We’re trying…
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Absolutely… Just address it in whatever way works for young people and other populations – and like Dutty Berry and others make the topic interesting, funny etc. Got to reach people somewhere.
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I like the fact that this campaign is proactive rather than reactive – but I honestly don’t see this changing the mind of the average Jamaican. Our environmental programmes need a stronger incentive than saving the environment because people just do not care.
Case in point – I live with about 5 other girls in a rented house. When we were working on a cleaning schedule for the common areas one newcomer protested that her mother didn’t send her to Kingston to clean house (they very house she lives in, mind you).
Everyone believes untidy surroundings are not their problem. We need to find a way to make it their problem.
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Robyn, it sounds as if this girl is just plain lazy! 🙂 Probably her mother ran around cleaning up after her at home. Tell her, “Welcome to the real world of adults!” You just need to on a personal level re-educate people who talk like that. Although I think most Jamaicans do care about keeping their homes clean. They just need more civic pride. Garbage is also a public health problem – breeding mosquitoes and flies and encouraging rodents – people are already aware of this, especially after chik v and the invasion of rats in New Kingston. But our health is closely linked to environmental issues. This is one effort to “make it people’s problem.” Or do we wait until we are overwhelmed, and visitors say they are not coming here any more because the island is too filthy? Yes, then it will be a problem I guess! I saw a visitor on TV recently doing a video of the filth in Ocho Rios…
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I was mainly working off of Dutty Berry’s intro video for the campaign, which doesn’t really highlight many health issues.
I am hopeful that pointing out the public health problems will make people more inclined to care about the environment but given the laissez-faire attitude of many Jamaicans to their own personal health, as well as the pervading belief that the govt MUST clean up after them I’m kind of pessimistic.
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True, the video does not highlight health issues much but perhaps during the campaign this could be addressed. It is something that did cross my mind. Certainly one of the aims is to make people understand that the government cannot/will not be able to clean up after them! That was emphasized… Let’s see how it goes…
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Nuh Dutty Up Jamaica seeks to change the idea that the garbage each of us generates is someone else’s problem. If all we do is clean gullies, that attitude continues. Furthermore, cleaning the gullies is an enormous logistical problem, as many of them are narrow and without access to heavy equipment. And we must ask ourselves: in the current situation in Jamaica of ever more scarce resources, is this preventable problem what we want to spend them on?
With regard to carrying garbage in taxis or buses, what kind of garbage are we talking about? If you buy a patty for lunch, eat it and there is no bin on the street, what is wrong with keeping it with you until there is a bin – whether that bin is at work, at a transport centre or at home? We are not suggesting that people carry huge bags of garbage around with them, of course.
As for the need for better garbage infrastructure – bins, skips and dumps – we fully agree. The Nuh Dutty Up Jamaica campaign has a stakeholders committee which includes the National Solid Waste Management Authority and we hope to find creative ways to improve these aspects. We do agree that if there is no collection and no storage for garbage, all the public education in the world will not solve the problem.
At a meeting on the weekend, a visitor to Jamaica, whose children had been brought up with a strong anti litter ethic, told me a story. Her children attended one of the many 5K runs here and were shocked to see the discarding of plastic bags containing water on the street throughout the race. They were assured they would be collected afterwards by someone else, and of course they were. But, the visitor, told me, after that her children became much more comfortable discarding waste on the ground. Their ATTITUDE to waste had changed – throw it on the ground, because someone else will pick it up.
That is what the Nuh Dutty Up Jamaica campaign seeks to change. We hope all of Jamaica will join us.
Thanks for this blog post, Emma.
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Diana, the gullies are a STOCK and FLOW problem. The garbage in them now is waiting to go somewhere, most likely the see if no action is taken. The less that is in them the less that can go to the sea. We also want to stop people adding to the garbage there, at least at a rate less than we have them cleared. I think setting in terms of whether the resources should be spent is the problem of all policy issues, and will mean the answer is no. But, then we cannot complain at the consequence of the environment continuing to deteriorate. Prevention only deals with future accumulation (flow) while we still have to deal with what is already there (stock). One solution, like the beach clearup, is to target similarly gullies.
The anecdote about the 5k sounds worrying, except that it’s part of the culture of such events, as can be seen if one watches events in say NYC or Boston or Washington DC (speaking from experience). The difference in most of those places is that most people are accustomed to dealing with garbage and they are used to having at least bins, etc. In a regular run over Thanksgiving in Maryland, the route was equally messy at the end. Clearup up happened afterwards, with a mixture of organized and voluntary clearpup. But, the attitude of most afterwards was that as they walked to cars to go home, many of them picked up on their way and then deposited at home or in bins.
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…the sea..
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But I explained, Dennis, that this is not a reactive “clean up” program… It is proactive, with the aim of changing people’s attitudes and behavior over time. We are fully aware of the clogged gullies but as I noted before, cleaning them is a very costly business that the government only seems to undertake before hurricane season. The idea is not to get the garbage there in the first place.
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But the garbage is there and won’t go anywhere but toward the sea, if it can reach there.
Changing attitudes cant happen fast enough to deal with the rate of garbage accumulation.
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Exactly.
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Thank you so much for your explanations, Diana. I have a good mind now to repost all these comments into a new blog post! 🙂 I touched on many of these issues in my blog. I heard the NSWMA head say one day that they couldn’t put skips in communities because people were dumping dead dogs in them, etc. so they stopped. The example of the 5K run is a good one. Especially with young people it is not so hard to change behavior, which comes from changing attitudes. We grownups must set the right example, though!
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Kudos for the campaign.
Some of the adivce in the video wont fly well in Jamaica. Taking garbage home in a scandal bag, when most people travel in crowded buses and taxis? I think not.
Personal view: taking issue with who is used to clear garbage misses the point that it’s being addressed. There are lots of simple and sensible reasons for using an employee during the day, than say doing it oneself in early morning or late evening darkness.
Cleaning and clearing the Kingston gullies would address lots of the problems about how debris gets to the sea. Credit The Gleaner for their Picture This feature last week about that issue, http://jamaica-gleaner.com/videos/video.php?id=1675. That’s worth playing and replaying. We even have housing built by gullies (illegally?) that is designed to vent waste directly into them. You can also see where communities have built paths or roads to gullies so that people can EASILY get there to dispose of garbage. If it’s so obvious to the passing eye, why can’t a responsible authority address that? That’s a point not touched in the campaign.
Good luck!
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Thanks, but I disagree with you on the bags. Gully-cleaning is fantastically costly and if you can stop people from throwing the stuff into drains etc in the first place, that would automatically reduce the amount of garbage in gullies, wouldn’t it. And however easy it may look to access SOME inner city areas, many NSWMA trucks simply don’t like to go in there for various reasons and are not expected to. It’s easy for us to say in our uptown areas with “employees.” But as I said, our wealthy neighbor still doesn’t want to clear up the mess on his doorstep, and he must have “employees.”
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Maybe I see the gully problem differently. One reason for my reactions is what I see how gullies in many Kingston communities have been ‘formalized’ as tipping zones, with paths and ramps to ease that. That’s not the same as casually tossing away small items that accumulate. That’s a ‘solution’ to several problems of waste disposal not being provided by the State.
The other aspect of not dealing with that problem can be seen in areas that appear neat and tidy. Take a look around Digicel’s HQ, and look in the drains around the otherwise pristine building: they are clogged with garbage that has become blocked. That means whenever water comes to those areas, it stops flowing. I’m not sure if Digi has noted this and can deal with it–it’s NWA property, I suspect. The gully problem ‘ripples’ (or not) through Kingston.
No one need have ’employees’ because of position or wealth. Having and using them if they exist is no crime. 🙂
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I don’t think we see it differently. It’s just that gullies are the responsibility of local government I believe, and they have no resources to clean them. I disagree with you on the employees; only the wealthy have them, and that is a fact. No crime.
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Understood on local government, but the reality is also that it’s about priorities, and if it goes high enough up the list, it will have to be financed.
On ’employees’, sorry, lots of Jamaicans have employees and helpers and some are not at all wealthy. I can introduce you to some, if you like. 🙂 One gets a particular impression in Kingston, I’ll agree, but take care to say that’s the national situation.
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I don’t know about people out of town but truly… People below a certain income bracket do not have helpers! The only time local government considers cleaning gullies and drains important is just before hurricane season, as I said – especially if it’s forecast to be a busy one. Then there is a last minute scramble!
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Emma, my basic point is that I don’t think it’s useful to take issue with how some people deal legally/lawfully/timely with garbage disposals; that’s personal choice. We have different means. Surely, the point is that they address the situation effectively.
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