Illegal dumping continues to plague communities across Barbados, with environmental officials warning that offenders are discarding everything from household appliances and mattresses to animal carcasses, despite the risk of prosecution and fines.
Acting Chief Environmental Health Officer Euroline Welch-Drakes said illegal dumping remains one of the biggest environmental challenges facing her department, with hotspots emerging across the island, particularly in St Thomas and St Philip.
“Yes, we do have problems with illegal dumping,” Welch-Drakes said. “And yes, if we do see or find anybody that we can prove was the person who did the dumping, we can do one or two things: we can ask them to remove it and take it to the official site, which is the Mangrove Pond landfill, or we can take them to court.”
She said offenders could also be prosecuted under the Health Services (Collection and Disposal of Refuse) Regulations or issued a $300 penalty under the Nuisances Regulations.
Despite those enforcement measures, Welch-Drakes acknowledged that illegal dumping continues unabated.
“People dump beds. We see a lot of stoves and those types of things. I’ve seen people dumping entrails, offal, dead animals. ”
She recalled the discovery of a massive illegal dumping site at Chancery Lane, Christ Church, which was so extensive that it attracted national attention.
Welch-Drakes said while enforcement remains available, her department’s priority is preventing conditions that threaten public health.
“We’re more about remediation than enforcement,” she said. “We want to prevent dumping and stop conditions from getting to a level where disease transmission can happen.”
But she admitted that the work often feels neverending.
“Even though you may get the landowner to clean up or you get assistance from the Sanitation Service Authority to clean for us, sometimes you go back, and those areas are full again of refuse,” she said. She also warned that many people unknowingly commit offences by disposing of garden waste on vacant lots. “People do not necessarily think that placing bush that they cut down on another lot, they don’t think of that as illegal dumping; but that also qualifies,” she said. Director and Trailway Lead at the Future Centre Trust, Barney Gibbs, said while litter on beaches often grabs public attention, the worst dumping is taking place inland. “The pattern we see is inland,” Gibbs said. “The beaches get the attention, but the volume of refuse is terrible at the quiet inland sites – gullies and back roads – where people think no one is watching.” “A gully is not a garbage bin; when people dump there, they are poisoning their own tap water and ours.”
He said volunteers routinely encounter everything from discarded juice boxes to refrigerators during clean-up exercises, but described dumped tyres as among the greatest threats.
“Nobody carries a fridge into a gully by accident,” Gibbs said. “This is deliberate, and it is ‘wutless’. Every tyre in the gully is a mosquito nursery. In a dengue and Zika region, this is an extreme health risk as well as plain ugly.”
Gibbs said it was unfair that community volunteers were repeatedly forced to clean up after a small number of offenders.
“During our big annual cleanup, it takes hndreds of people to clean up after a handful of incorrigible litterbugs,” he said. “Our volunteers’ goodwill should not be the national waste plan.”
While the Future Centre Trust is encouraging communities to organise smaller, more frequent clean-up exercises, Gibbs believes stronger enforcement is needed.
“The threats have been made, the cameras have been promised; now show us the convictions,” he said.
Founder of Keep Barbados Clean, Peter Bynoe, painted an equally bleak picture, saying years of volunteer clean-up efforts have done little to change public behaviour.
“We were cleaning up illegal dumping sites up to today,” Bynoe said. “People dumping household stuff off the side of the road and up in cart roads. No, it’s not getting any better.”
He said his latest clean-up uncovered discarded car seats, old televisions, clothing and toiletries.
Bynoe argued that penalties for illegal dumping are too lenient and called for authorities to impose harsher sanctions on offenders.
He believes offenders should face substantial fines in addition to having their vehicles seized.
“Fine them heavily, impound their vehicle, maybe not forever, but impound it for a month or something,” Bynoe said. “Make them feel.” (CA)