On International Coastal Cleanup Day 2017, nearly 10,000 volunteers helped to collect over 72 metric tons of garbage from Jamaica’s beaches and coasts. The Jamaica Observer reports:

A record 160,628 pounds of garbage, including nearly 300,000 plastic beverage bottles, was collected from beaches across the island on International Coastal Cleanup (ICC) Day last September, the Jamaica Environment Trust (JET) reported yesterday.

The volume of waste was included in one of two reports released by JET, the other showing that Nuh Dutty Up Jamaica (NDUJ) Cleanup Network activities in 2017 resulted in 5,431 pounds of garbage, including 15,517 plastic bottles, being collected.

“It came as no surprise that plastic bottles were the number one item collected during these clean-up efforts,” a JET news release quoted the organisations’s CEO Suzanne Stanley. “This is a long-standing trend we have seen over the many years JET has coordinated clean-ups in Jamaica. Many Jamaicans believe carelessly discarding their one plastic bottle cannot be a problem. They do not appreciate that every single piece of garbage thrown carelessly in the street or a gully contributes to the ever-increasing scope and scale of Jamaica’s solid waste management issues.”

Read more in the complete Observer article. See also: the national report on International Coastal Cleanup Day in Jamaica [pdf], published by JET.

[Image credit: John Schneider]