189 sites registered for Coastal Clean-up Day
The Jamaica Environment Trust (JET) is reporting that it has registered 189 clean-up sites for International Coastal Clean-up (ICC) Day scheduled for Saturday, September 21.
According to JET, clean-ups have been registered in every major coastal town across the island this year, including the cities of Kingston, Portmore and Montego Bay — a first for the annual event which has been coordinated by JET on a national scale and funded by the Tourism Enhancement Fund since 2008.
“Over 10,000 Jamaican volunteers are gearing up for ICC Day next week, where they will tackle the huge quantities of solid waste which have been transported to our coast by the heavy rains which have been affecting the island recently,” the JET release quotes CEO Suzanne Stanley. “Most of the garbage we remove on ICC Day comes from inland sources — carelessly discarded waste, which is carried by gullies, rivers and drains to our coastline. The possibility that we will see the coastline of every major coastal town in Jamaica cleaned up by Jamaican volunteers for ICC 2019 is a huge milestone.”
JET says it has registered 3,000 volunteers for its flagship clean-up on the Palisadoes strip in Kingston, and will work with 138 site coordinators to carry out clean-ups in all 14 parishes, including 19 underwater clean-ups.
“At ICC clean-ups, volunteers are not only responsible for picking up trash, but also collecting data on the type of garbage they collect,” says Tamoy Singh Clarke, JET’s programme director. “We are very interested to see whether Jamaica’s ban on certain types of single-use plastic in January this year will change the composition and quantity of waste collected on ICC Day 2019.”
The data collected by volunteers on ICC Day is compiled and sent by JET to the Ocean Conservancy, which has been coordinating the event globally since 1985. A full list of 2019 ICC events taking place across the island on September 21 is available on JET’s website, at the following link:
www.jamentrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/ICC_2019_SITES_PUBLIC-updated-September-11-2019.pdf
