LEAVE it to financial brokers to find money during a garbage collection.

Volunteers from GraceKennedy (GK) Financial Group, who took on a section of the Palisadoes Go-Kart Track for International Coastal Clean-up (ICC) Day on Saturday, told the Jamaica Observer that among the refuse they pulled from between the mangroves along the shores of the Kingston Harbour was a J$50-note.

“The most interesting thing we found was money,” said Shanoy Coombs of The Write House, which does some public relations work for the group, said.

“There were a lot of plastic bottles, plastic cups, plastic bags, but there were also some interesting things like cigarette lighters, a heavy bed spread, and a car tyre, and many of them seem to have been wrapped around the mangroves for years, maybe decades,” said group CEO Courtney Campbell.

Campbell led a team of 80 staffers from the banking, money services, and insurance arms of the division who volunteered on Saturday. All told, they collected more than 30 large garbage bags of refuse in the three hours from 7:30 am to 10:30 am.

This was the group’s second time participating in ICC Day. Last year, the team collaborated with the Jamaica Environment Trust (JET) at its Fort Rocky site. This year, however, Campbell said the GK team wanted to have more impact so it launched out on its own.

“We really do care about the environment and this is our way of contributing to a safer environment,” he said.

Making reference to GraceKennedy’s involvement in other environmental projects, Campbell said there is a chair at the University of the West Indies that is funded by the company, and that the GraceKennedy Foundation is financing work at Pedro Cays to deal with sanitation and public health.

“We are really committed to the environment because we believe in sustainable growth, so whatever we can do to raise public awareness and public consciousness, you can count us in on that,” Campbell said.

The group said it will be donating the $50 to JET.

— Kimone Thompson