Diana McCaulay

“The garbage is full,” my husband said. “Should we take it out?”

“No point,” I said. “The dump must be closed.” We drove to Jack’s Hill above Kingston and stared at the dump fire – a brown pall that settled over the western edge of the city and obscured points beyond. Kingston looked like a drawing someone had tried to erase.

The Riverton City dump – it is not a landfill – for Kingston and adjoining parishes has been burning since February 7th. It is the nth time. There are small fires every month; big ones every year or so. Just over half of all the solid waste generated in Jamaica ends up at Riverton City, which is adjacent to a river, the sea, major roads, commercial and residential areas. Hundreds, if not thousands of people live or work on the dump itself in unspeakable conditions. When it burns, the scene is Dante-esque – the low flames, the masked and garbed men, the machines pushing a tsunami of waste, covering the fire with dirt. The very ground smokes. Modernity’s high and often hidden costs.

Back home, the neighbors discussed the pile up of garbage in our community. Garbage collection as civil right, I thought. And I imagined our bag of garbage being taken to Riverton, there to await the next fire. Oh I try with waste reduction, we have a compost heap, I take plastic bottles for recycling. But still, as the dump burns, here is the garbage of my household. How to evade a system that always locates dumps wherever the poorest people live, tolerates children sorting through the most noxious waste imaginable; how to change a system that pays attention to garbage only when breathing becomes difficult?

I know waste can be better handled in sanitary landfills, but even landfills burn. Here in Jamaica, we embrace consumer culture without the income to handle its byproducts and garbage is everywhere – on beaches and mountain trails, by the side of the road, in rivers and the gullies and whenever it rains, in the sea. It strikes me that no one talks anymore about reduction of garbage. Surely, in an island nation where acres of garbage dump could be better used for houses, schools, businesses and recreation, where the health services are stretched to the limit – the throwaway culture is an aspect of ‘progress’ we should not seek to emulate?