Beach-lover celebrates birthday with clean-up
TODAY IS Ayanna Dixon’s birthday, and as she has done for the past three years, the milestone was marked with a mindful celebration — a beach clean-up with friends, volunteers, partners and some people, who up until the day, she had never met.
The team gathered on the Palisadoes strip, ahead of the 7:00 am start on Saturday, March 7, united by their shared purpose and ready to sort, collect and recycle.
The Palisadoes is a pollution hotspot. A lot of garbage carelessly discarded along the streets of Kingston lands in gullies and floats along the harbour to the shores of this strip of land, notes Suzanne Stanley, CEO of the Jamaica Environment Trust.
“You find a wide range of things. I mean, straws, bottles, we found a toilet, part of a refrigerator, toys, slippers, you name it, sneakers, we found it. It’s actually very, very horrible. And I mean this is just Palisadoes so you can imagine all the other places, for example, when you go to Morant Point, out by the lighthouse, you actually get garbage from Haiti, you get garbage from the Dominican Republic out there,” said Dixon.
The idea for a birthday beach clean-up was born in 2018, at the height of discussions around a ban on single-use plastic bags, straws and polystyrene. Dixon, at the time, wanted to raise awareness among her friends. It didn’t hurt that it was her birthday, and her friends would have some obligation to do exactly what she wanted.
“I love the beach. I wanted to take care of it, so my friends come out because of that. And also I nag them,” she said, with a chuckle.
PUBLIC SUPPORT
The public has also been receptive. Evelyn Abreu, who is originally from the Dominican Republic, heard about the clean-up through an Instagram post. Her motivation, like other participants, was clear: this is our beach, our planet and our responsibility.
“I [already collected] two bags today, one of them was [filled with] plastic and the other garbage and I want to collect another because there is just so much plastic,” shared Abreu.
IMPROVED TALLY
This year, the team collected a total of 82 bags from the beach at the Palisadoes, 42 bags of recyclable waste and 40 bags of garbage. All of which were properly sorted and recycled or disposed of with the help of their partners, Wisynco, who has been on board with the initiative from the beginning; Recycling Partners of Jamaica and the National Solid Waste Management Authority.