Cleaning Plastic Pollution in Kingston's Mangroves, Jamaica 🇯🇲

Today is the Great Mangrove Cleanup Trash Tournament. It's 6.07am. We will probably start doing some superstitions next to stop the rain, but hopefully by 6.30 the rain will breeze off, our officials and our boat people will be out, and we can head out into the harbour to clean. So we've been, since this year, starting a campaign where we're partnering with private sector organisations, community groups, etc., to do cleanup of mangrove areas within the Kingston Harbour. And this is all in efforts, essentially, to remove legacy waste from these areas after we have placed barriers at the mouths of gullies in the Kingston Harbour. Get your engines ready. Three, two, one. You are clear for take-off. Let's have some fun. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You want a new purse? So how are we doing, man? Going on fine. Yeah? Yeah. Filling up those bags here? Give the mangroves a chance to breathe. Indeed. Yeah. What I see, it's a bit alarming to see that there are more mangroves dying. They're slowly disappearing. Yeah. I'm cleaning up the beach, making it better for me and my kids. It's nice. I like you guys. We like you too, Charlie. Mangroves are a very important ecosystem because of the diverse ecosystem services they provide. They serve as a source of food and as important habitat for biodiversity. They also help to protect communities from extreme weather events, such as flooding and hurricanes. We started to notice the loss of the forest in the 70s. And this has been a gradual progression by the increasing pollution of Kingston Harbour. Because we need to remove, if we could, every piece of plastic from these mangroves. They're going to become microplastics. And once you get microplastics in your system, and you're a nursery for fish, and persons collect food from the mangroves, they collect the oysters, we really can't afford the microplastics load that we are going to get once these plastics fragment. It's a lot. Because you see, we've already pulled about 11 bags of clear plastic bottles. But the mangrove is a place that you have to keep it well, properly clean, because this rubbish suffocates the mangrove root. So we are trying, you know, to see as much as what we can do to take some of this rubbish off the root of it, so we can survive as fishermen. How many fridges have you got? About ten, so far. Ten fridges? Yeah. Wow. We started looking for the big stuff, and then we discovered a mother load of tyres. There's a whole load of tyres along the shore here, so we've decided to focus on this. You can hardly see the ground for the plastic, and the rubbish, and the crap, and just stuff that flows in from the gullies into the harbour. I sail in the harbour here a lot, and it's awful. To be honest, like, it needs to be stopped at the source. Yeah. Like, we need to stop producing as much plastic, and if we produce it, you know, it cannot end up here. Cleaning up, like we do right now here, you know, it's not the solution, right? Eventually, you want to go to a point where this is no longer necessary, right? But what the clean-up and intercepting plastic in rivers provide us right now is damage control. It's a very efficient band-aid to make sure the marine ecosystem can restore, while we have more upstream policy changes, like the Global Plastics Treaty, that make sure that this problem is solved on a global scale at its root. But cleaning it up really makes sure that, as today, if we would not be here and not clean up that plastic, it would still be here 10, 30, 40 years from now. And so, it can take decades for policies to take action, and we need different measures. There's not one-size-fits-all solution. All of it, together, will make sure that we have a maximum impact on the environment here. So, a bit of work. You've got a seat, fridge, stuff, and lots of bottles. Before the clean-up, upon arriving, it felt overwhelming. Like, how many hours do we need to do this? During, it was discouraging, but as we progressed throughout the clean-up, it was seemingly better, and then I was encouraged to keep going. If we are able to make the awareness spread more across Jamaica, then maybe the garbage that we see here won't be as much. Still surprised as to how they got there, but I am encouraged and I look forward to another clean-up. I am motivated. I am more aware of what is really happening. So, yeah, I'm happy I came, to say the least. Okay, so today was really good. It was very encouraging. We had great turnouts. I think in total we had 21 boats come out, which is really great. That's a lovely turnout. And we collected so much garbage, but yes, it was wonderful. We found some very interesting things. I think everybody was very surprised by the amount of garbage that we found, and the amount of plastics. So, I would say props to our participants. Props to my coordinating team, because that was a lot of garbage to weigh. And props to everybody who has worked on this event today. It has, I think, been a true testament to teamwork and to shared vision. Today's Recreational Vessel for the Most Trash Collective goes to Vessel Ragamuffin. Congratulations! Yeah, it's fun. We had fun, and we spoke amongst ourselves, and we're never missing another Trash Tournament. We're going to try to get more people to come on board. There are other boats that we can get involved. We're going to spread the word, and we're going to try to clean up the garbage. This is a dream come true. This is something I've wanted to see happen forever. It's so great to have the Ocean Cleanup here, to be with us, to be a part of this experience. I mean, we've all been working so hard together, and I'm excited that it's going to create energy, that we can get a lot more boats involved, and for us to do it again even bigger and better. It's amazing work that is being done by local partners, by local communities, by the fishermen, and really making sure that we try to solve this problem. What we were able to achieve today through this Trash Tournament, to me, is almost just as important as what we do for the project in terms of installing interceptor barriers at the mouth of these gullies, because bringing all of these people together, the yacht club members, fishermen, volunteers, what it really does is help to create awareness about the issue of pollution facing the harbour. And I think once we raise awareness, it gives people an incentive to make changes to their daily lives that actually create a really big impact and a really big ripple effect.