The National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA) and, by extension, citizens who have civic pride must feel they are on a treadmill.

We have drawn that conclusion based on last week’s revelation by NSWMA Operations Manager Ms Aretha McFarlane that illegal dumping is proving a big headache for the agency.

Ms McFarlane told journalists at a press conference called to address the issue of a backlog of garbage that illegal dump sites “are popping up everywhere”, despite the NSWMA’s efforts to clean them.

“You clean one today and by tomorrow you go back there you wonder if it was cleaned at all. That’s what we are experiencing,” she said.

That, no doubt, must be frustrating to the crews tasked with the job of clearing the country of solid waste and who have had to deal with rampant littering.

Each time we examine this issue we remember the campaign spearheaded by the now late Mr Sameer Younis in 1982 to keep the capital city clean.

The ‘Clean as a Whistle’ campaign, as it was named, inspired the formation of Metropolitan Parks and Markets and later the promulgation of The Litter Act.

The campaign was heralded by a massive public education programme to stimulate civic pride.

Mr Younis, in an interview with this newspaper many years later, recalled that the campaign resulted in people openly rebuking each other for littering. Some 3,000 garbage bins were placed on city streets and that was complemented by a programme for motor cars, buses, schools, and workplaces.

Since then, many campaigns have been implemented to keep the country clean. However, the entities responsible for solid waste collection and management continuously face the nasty practices of too many of our people who dump their garbage anywhere. The problem is made worse by the fact that the police have been negligent in enforcing the anti-litter law which, admittedly, is not supported by strong enough sanctions to deter people from disposing of waste wherever they please.

Over the years, the NSWMA has spent millions of dollars dealing with this problem. We recall the Auditor General’s Department reporting in 2022 that over the period 2016-17 to 2020-21, approximately $32 billion was allocated for solid waste management, with more than half disbursed from property tax collections.

Last year, the NSWMA, in collaboration with a number of entities in Kingston, embarked on a major waste-disposal initiative to improve the environment and promote civic duty.

The activity, called Klean Kingston, focused heavily on the capital city’s business district.

It was also a part of the NSWMA’s Clean City programme designed to target a backlog of garbage in town centres.

That initiative was supported by an intense and sustained public education campaign in communities, schools, churches, and the media, with a strong focus on getting Jamaicans to appreciate the value to public health of reducing and managing waste.

That we are back here with a backlog of garbage suggests that any gains from the public education campaign were short term; that the NSWMA either fell down or had great difficulty maintaining the effort; and, definitely lack of strict enforcement of the law.

We can’t emphasise too much the importance of keeping our environment clean. Preservation of people’s health and well-being are just two major benefits. A collective effort is needed if we are to change minds and overcome this problem.