International Coastal Clean-up (ICC) Day is a valuable reminder that protecting Jamaica’s natural environment is not the responsibility of Government, environmental groups, or a handful of committed citizens. It is a duty to be shared by all of us.

We have no choice but to commend the thousands of Jamaicans who will again give their time on Saturday to remove garbage from beaches, rivers, gullies, and other waterways as part of ICC Day 2026.

Their willingness to roll up their sleeves and work — in the heat, no less — to restore places that should never have been littered in the first place deserves our appreciation.

Jamaica Environment Trust (JET), which coordinates the initiative locally, says more than 170 clean-ups have been registered involving 135 groups. Clearly, then, many Jamaicans understand the importance of preserving the island’s environment.

But there is an uncomfortable contradiction at the heart of this annual exercise. Why must so many decent, responsible Jamaicans repeatedly volunteer to clean up the mess created by others who appear to have little regard for their surroundings?

Plastic bottles, food containers, bags, and other refuse casually thrown from vehicles, dumped in gullies, or left behind at beaches and rivers paint a shameful picture.

Too many Jamaicans treat public spaces as personal garbage bins, apparently believing that once waste leaves their hands it ceases to be their problem.

It does not.

This year’s ICC Day theme, ‘Away is a Place’, captures the reality perfectly. Whatever we throw away goes somewhere. And far too often that somewhere is a gully, river, or the Caribbean Sea.

We are told that during recent clean-up drives coordinated by JET volunteers retrieved more than 94,000 pounds — approximately 42,600 kilogrammes — of mixed trash from targeted Jamaican coastlines in a single wave. Plastic beverage bottles have consistently ranked as the number-one item collected.

That should spur us into action.

We agree with JET CEO Dr Theresa Rodriguez-Moodie that clean-ups cannot be the long-term answer to plastic pollution, and that greater emphasis must be placed on preventing waste at the source. Her call for extended producer responsibility, reduced reliance on unnecessary single-use plastics, better packaging practices, reuse and stronger recovery systems deserves serious attention.

But Dr Rodriguez-Moodie should go further to make the point that responsibility does not rest only with producers. The public has a responsibility, too.

Manufacturers cannot be expected to solely solve a problem that consumers perpetuate.

Government can improve collection, enforcement, and recycling systems, but no policy can compensate for people being simply nasty.

ICC Day is important not only because it removes tonnes of garbage from vulnerable ecosystems, but because the volunteers document what they find. That information contributes to a global dataset that helps identify the sources and types of marine litter and shape responses.

However, we want the day to come when the number of volunteers needed for clean-ups falls dramatically because there is simply less garbage to collect.

That requires enforcement, better waste management systems, producer accountability, and a change in behaviour.

So, as we applaud those who will participate on Saturday, let us also ask ourselves a most fundamental question: Why are they having to clean up after us?