Rebuilding with rubbish

WESTERN BUREAU:

Amid concerns about uncollected garbage and the capacity of St James’ Retirement waste disposal site to handle increasing waste from across western Jamaica post-Hurricane Melissa, some environmental stakeholders are declaring that certain types of garbage could be repurposed as material for roads, buildings, and coastal reefs.

The Retirement facility, one of seven official garbage disposal sites across Jamaica, receives waste from St James, Trelawny, Hanover, and Westmoreland, the four parishes under the jurisdiction of the National Solid Waste Management Authority’s (NSWMA) Western Parks and Markets (WPM). All four parishes, along with St Elizabeth, were among the worst affected by the devastating Category-5 hurricane on October 28, last year.

Theresa Rodriguez-Moodie, chief executive officer of the Jamaica Environment Trust (JET), told The Gleaner that, while it is possible to re-use debris from a natural disaster for rebuilding or other purposes, policies for such circumstances need to be clearly established ahead of time.

“We can look at other countries that have dealt with disasters and how they have handled waste, as one of the biggest problems after any disaster is what to do with the waste, because you have environmental, social, and health implications for it. For instance, you can use concrete waste as filling, or you can create jobs by creating a situation where you separate reusable waste, like scrap metal, for people to purchase,” said Rodriguez-Moodie.

“Not everything that ends up in the garbage is really garbage, because some things can be repurposed, composted, reused, and recycled. We see some of this happening normally in the Riverton dump in St Catherine, where you have ‘waste-pickers’ that come in and are allowed to sift through the garbage,” Rodriguez-Moodie continued. “But the reality is that we should have a plan for how we intend to reduce certain types of waste, because we have no industrial composting facilities, and I think at least 40 per cent of our waste is compostable.”

The idea of repurposing waste is supported by Dramaine Jones, WPM’s regional operations manager, who said a significant amount of the post-Melissa waste consists of tree cuttings that could be used as mulch for gardening or soil composting.

“After Melissa, one of the things that we realised is that there were a lot of tree cuttings in a number of places in Westmoreland, sections of Hanover, and even in St James. We isolated the wood waste, transported them to a separate holding area, and we basically shredded them, and you can literally spread that material out and it deteriorates over time,” said Jones.

“In one case, we had a significant amount of those tree cuttings in Westmoreland, and I went back there to get some for my garden, and I could not find any, because persons would have realised its value and utilised it,” Jones added. “We are what you call the masters of recycling. If you visit the disposal site, you see a number of persons there picking out all the scrap iron, the glass bottles, the plastics, and anything that can be reused.”

In November, the United Nations reported that some 4.8 million tonnes of debris was left behind in western Jamaica following Hurricane Melissa. In the months since the storm, citizens have accused the NSWMA of failing to collect their waste, both before and after Melissa, while also complaining that the garbage pile-ups have contributed to an increase in some communities’ rodent populations.

To date, WPM’s preliminary estimates indicate that roughly 7,000 truckloads of garbage had been removed from across the four parishes in its coverage area to the Retirement disposal site. Of that amount, approximately 5,000 truckloads of waste have been collected across St James, including 3,000 loads from the flood-ravaged Catherine Hall area in Montego Bay; up to 1,000 truckloads from Westmoreland, with some of that waste being sent to St Elizabeth’s local landfill; and 500 truckloads each from Hanover and Trelawny.

Those numbers do not include debris collected from private entities or through clean-up efforts spearheaded by municipal corporation councillors and members of parliament.

Meanwhile, speaking about potentially using debris to fortify reefs, Rodriguez-Moodie said that only certain waste materials could be used in this way without harming the environment.

“It is not going to be a case where you take your residential waste or old computers and just dump it, because you can have leaching of certain chemicals into the water. I do know that concrete has been used to create structures as the starting point for coral reefs to grow, so that can be done, but it is not like you just take garbage and dump it in the sea and then expect coral reefs to grow,” said Rodriguez-Moodie.

Hugh Shim, director of the Montego Bay Marine Park in St James, pointed to the failure of the Osborne Reef project, where two million tyres were used to create a man-made reef off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida in the 1970s, as an example of the potential negative long-term effects of certain waste materials.

“This matter is something that is subject to study over time, because you could suggest something now and then after 10 years it proves not to be healthy. Once upon a time, overseas, some people put tyres out as reefs, and after a while the toxins from the tyres started to harm the environment,” said Shim.

“We have to be careful what we are going to say we will use as reefing. It has to be proven material, not waste that you just see piled up and that you will just crush up. Sand-based and metal-based waste could possibly be used, and bulky waste and old stones could be ground down and moulded into usable material, and glass could work also,” Shim added.

christopher.thomas@gleanerjm.com