MONTEGO BAY, St James — Entertainment, Sustainability, Impact, Research, Online and Manufacturing (ESIROM) Limited, a Kingston-based digital consulting agency, has plans to transform plastic waste removed from Kingston Harbour into marketable products. It also envisions the harbour, once free of pollution, as the perfect venue for activities now associated with resort areas.

“We will be recycling plastic that we collect out of Kingston Harbour, specifically type two and type five type of plastic. We will be washing it, shredding it and melting it down into new products that we will then target to tourists and tourism sector,” said ESIROM founder and director Alex Morrissey.

He was addressing scores of tertiary and secondary school students in attendance at the Tourism Youth Forum held at Montego Bay Convention Centre in St James on Friday.

“One of the first products that we’ll be launching with is sunglasses. But, of course, you can take out the sunglasses and put in tested lens if you want, and it’s made 100 per cent out of recycled plastic,” Morrissey added.

Speaking with the Jamaica Observer, he later revealed that over the past two years, the ESIROM Foundation has removed close to 10 tonnes of plastic waste from the Kingston Harbour.

Morrissey explained that the idea for the Kingston Harbour Eco Restoration Initiative (KHERI) arose when, on returning from a conference in South Korea, they noticed the harbour’s surface glistening with plastic. Shocked by the amount of pollution, they decided action was needed, leading the ESIROM Foundation to launch KHERI to clean the harbour and eventually restore it for recreational use such as tourism related activities.

“Right now the harbour is not used for anything. Back in the day, they used to have the harbour swim, when you could swim across from end to end, but because it’s so polluted now, that’s not safe. Our aim is to clean up the harbour, remove the plastic, and then introduce other initiatives later this year and next year. We’re considering using oysters to filter the water because oysters are a natural part of the system; and because of overfishing, and so forth, we don’t have as many oysters in the harbour. We’d have to work with NEPA (National Environmental and Planning Agency) and other entities to reintroduce them in specific areas to start cleaning out some of the toxins in the harbour. That then opens the door for anyone who wants to do tourism-related activities on the harbour, because now you have a safe space,” he explained.

“Because the harbour is relatively calm, you can do paddle boarding, you can do jet skiing, and you can enjoy other attractions that you’d normally only see in Ocho Rios or Montego Bay, but now you can have them in Kingston,” Morrissey added.

He said the foundation is beginning weekly clean-ups to remove more plastic and process it at their upcoming facility. They plan to partner with Recycling Partners of Jamaica to recycle type two and type five plastics locally instead of exporting them, making it the first efficient on-island recycling effort.

But while they can recycle bottle caps and containers such as detergent or rubbing alcohol bottles, they currently lack the capability to recycle type one bottles, which are the most common containers in Jamaica, Morrissey noted.

“So there’s so many different types of plastic, and all of them have a different recycling process. But… type one is the hardest to recycle,” he said.

He noted that Jamaica’s waste challenges are similar to Indonesia’s, so the team has visited that Southeast Asian country multiple times to study its plastic-processing methods and apply those lessons locally. He added that the facility’s second phase will handle not only plastics but also organic waste, since more than 70 per cent of household garbage in Jamaica is compostable and can be returned to the soil instead of creating emissions in dumps.

The Tourism Youth Forum, where the Sunday Observer caught up with Morrissey, was part of World Tourism Day 2025 celebrations, held under the theme ‘Tourism and Sustainable Transformation’. Since 1980, the United Nations World Tourism Organization has celebrated World Tourism Day as international observances on September 27.

Alex Morrissey, founder and director of ESIROM Limited, speaking during the Tourism Youth Forum at the Montego Bay Convention Centre in St James on Friday. (Photo: Horace Hines)