THE January 7 publication of OUR Habitat had a nice photo of a person raking a beach with the headline reading ‘Clean beach’. It depicted the result of a beach clean-up effort at a site in St Thomas. The inset was a startling photograph of solid waste on the beach.

That picture was certainly worth a thousand words, and it begs the question: ‘Where does all the garbage come from?’

In the 1990s, I participated in a study with Dr Barry Wade, general manager of Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica (PCJ), which looked at the garbage on several beaches around Jamaica.

The garbage consisted of different materials – plastic bottles, styrofoam plates and cups, glass bottles and jars, metal cans, wooden slates. The items ranged from partyware to personal beauty products and hypodermic needles. I suspect it was much the same for the garbage shown in the inset photo.

In the study, bags and bags of garbage were collected from the beaches, and the contents separated, weighed and put in categories. The findings revealed that the garbage came from a variety of sources, chief among them domestic/household sources. This was evidenced by the bags of garbage washed down from gullies during heavy rainfall. The garbage was washed into the sea, and wave action threw it back on to the beach.

Other sources of garbage on the beach included:

. people who picnicked and partygoers who dump rubbish on to the beach as evidenced by garbage bags filled with plastic plates, cups, knives and forks and straws; and

. offshore sources, as borne out by metal cans with foreign language labels, and other unknown products not marketed or distributed in Jamaica.

Now years later, the problem remains.

Although beach clean-up programmes should be applauded as commendable, they are really treating a symptom of a significant national problem: improper disposal of the tonnes of solid waste generated by our daily existence.

Dr Margaret Jones Williams is a director and principal consultant at Environmental Solutions Ltd (ESL), an environmental management services company with head offices in Kingston, Jamaica. Jones Williams is also manager of the Sustainable Development Services Division at ESL, which offers a range of environmental management services, including environmental impact assessments and strategic environmental assessments.