Wasting the Caribbean
Whether as a byproduct of production or what remains after use, waste is direct evidence of what we value, the costs we are willing to bear to extract that value, and who we choose to pay that price.
In 1984, the city of Philadelphia, running out of places to put its waste, loaded 15,000 tons of municipal ash on a ship destined for the Bahamas. Before this vessel, the ‘Khian Sea’, could reach its destination, environmental groups raised concerns over the toxicity of the ash and the ship was forced to find an alternate dump site. For almost two years, the Khian Sea zigzagged across oceans, over eleven countries and four continents, in hopes of offloading the toxic cargo. During that time the crew came dangerously close to mutiny, its engineer threatened to scuttle the vessel and was arrested, and the ship turned away at gunpoint at two ports. In January 1988, after 18 months and having found no one willing to accept the cargo, the crew of the Khian Sea illegally dumped 4,000 tons of incinerated ash masked as fertilizers, close to the beach in the town of Gonaives, in northern Haiti. When the ship arrived in Singapore that November, it had been renamed the Felicia in an attempt to escape the Khian Sea’s now-global notoriety.
For every object we encounter in our lives, from the most essential of material needs to the stuff of pure desire, there is a measure of waste. While humans produce over two billion tons of garbage each year, for most of us, the material reality of waste is largely invisible. The hidden and elaborate systems of modern waste management traffic solid and hazardous waste; industrial non-hazardous waste; agricultural and animal waste; medical waste; radioactive waste; construction and demolition debris; extraction and mining waste; oil and gas production waste; fossil fuel combustion waste; and sewage sludge. Despite our best efforts to process, transform, treat, camouflage, store and hide the vast amounts and varieties of waste produced, it remains a creeping shadow of modern existence, a co-conspirator from which we cannot disentangle ourselves.
Of the 12 million tons of waste that the Caribbean generates each year, over 90% is deposited at burn sites, dumpsites or its more modern equivalent, landfills (source). Though relatively low cost and initially effective, the long term, large scale viability of these sites is limited, a reality that many islands are grappling with today. Serving the island’s 40,000 residents (and 3.4 million visitors per year), the St. Maarten garbage dump, for example, has become a looming mountain of trash - well beyond its intended use. By 2017, both Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands had already exceed US Environmental Protection Agency’s landfill capacity limits (source). Later that year, Hurricane Irma and Maria would rip through the territories, creating another 736,000 cubic yards of debris — the equivalent of 61,000 truckloads in the U.S. Virgin Islands alone. As nations know well, seasonal hurricanes and severe storms have the potential tore create vast amounts of waste from debris, demolition and, in their wake, new construction.
All together, overfilled, unrestricted, or mismanaged waste systems encourage diseases, contaminate ground and surface water, and contribute to the pollution of surrounding waters. For the Caribbean, home to some of the world’s most productive and diverse marine ecosystems, wholistic waste management practices are critical to the region’s long-term sustainable development. Particularly relevant and cause for concern is the abundance of plastic that makes its way to open water. According to a 2019 World Bank Report, up to 80% of the litter found in our oceans is made of plastic. An estimated 600 to 1,414 plastic items per square kilometer end up in the Caribbean Sea, making it second most plastic-contaminated sea in the world after the Mediterranean Sea. Competing priorities however, including job creation, education, security, trade and health, mean that waste management is not always part of the political agenda when it comes to public policy. Even in the area of environmental sustainability, waste management usually takes a backseat to climate change, land degradation, marine/coastal resources management, and loss of biodiversity.
After much public finger wagging towards the Caribbean for its relationship with single use plastics, 12 Caribbean countries have placed a ban on the use and import of single-use plastics and Styrofoam as of this year. The ongoing criticism however, of what has been described as a '“throw-away culture” throughout the Caribbean, tactically avoids a full accounting of the historical and global relationship to trash and trashing the Caribbean. For one, marine litter found in the Caribbean comes both from the region and from northern waters, brought in by ocean currents. According to a 2018 UN Environment report, an estimated 20,000 metric tons of trash from the Guatemala City landfill flows down the Motagua River into the Caribbean each year, where it washes ashore on Honduran beaches. More broadly, the true and modern weight of trash, encompasses the tensions between the immediate wants and needs of island citizens, the capacity and willingness of the region to process the world’s garbage, and our historical relationship to waste, land and consumption.
“The next abyss was the depths of the sea. Whenever a fleet of ships gave chase to slave ships, it was easiest just to lighten the boat by throwing cargo overboard, weighing it down with balls and chains. These underwater signposts mark the course between the Gold Coast and the Leeward Islands...In actual fact the abyss is a tautology: the entire ocean, the entire sea gently collapsing in the end into the pleasures of sand, make one vast beginning, but a beginning whose time is marked by these balls and chains gone green.”
At the United Nations Environmental Programme Basel Convention the year following the Khian Sea incident, a group of African nations first coined the term “waste colonialism” as a way to explain particular patterns of power in wasting and pollution. More specifically, waste colonialism describes the “transboundary disposal of a variety of hazardous and toxic wastes, including electronic-waste, persistent organic pollutants (POPs), industrial waste, decommissioned ships, municipal solid waste, radioactive waste, and other toxic waste. In these uses of the term, waste colonialism, as well as its sister terms garbage imperialism, toxic colonialism, nuclear colonialism, and toxic terrorism, among others, are almost always about the transboundary movement of waste from areas of privilege and affluence to areas with lower economic status and influence.” (source) Édouard Glissant’s specter of “balls and chains gone green” strewn across the depths of the Atlantic, serves as a haunting reminder of the region’s material legacy of abandonment and wastage in the context of violence, fear, slavery, death, and interoceanic travel.
Throughout the Caribbean, where significant amounts of gold and labor could not be salvaged from the land or the indigenous populations that occupied them, European powers sought other means to satisfy their appetites. The eventual economic success of products like sugar, coffee and bananas, would come at an immense environmental and human cost; the functional demands the plantation system demanded an inexorable wasting of land and people, all in the name of productivity. This pursuit of limitless growth bound the plantation system to both imagined and interminable supply of resources and the wake of waste that accompanies it. The extractive industries of agriculture and then later, tourism destroyed – and continue to destroy – local ecosystems, developed uneven trade systems, introduced hazardous chemicals, subjugated racial groups, and interrupted traditional relationships with the environment. Here, modern forms of pollution and the region’s ongoing relationship with waste find their roots in a colonial plantation system and mechanism of extraction and consumption that it engendered. This kind of ‘dumping logic’, laid bare by the actions of the ‘Khian Sea’ were controversial in scale and brazenness only. In truth, the inherent toxicity of the colonial process had long been developed, disseminated and integrated into a rendering of Caribbean landscapes as sites of consumption and pleasure, as well as discard and insignificance.
Re-framing toxicity in cultural, historical as well as anthropogenic terms creates opportunities to better understand, discuss and imagine our relationship with materialism and waste. Throughout literature and visual art, creatives such as Olive Senior and Tomás Sánchez have been also been investigating the intricacies of trash and land wrought through power and process. Senior’s poetry collection, Gardening in the Tropics portrays the imposition of waste on Caribbean islands, examining how extensive pollution is enabled and perpetuated by colonial systems and what interventions may interrupt it spread. Similarly, Sánchez produced scenes where, much like St. Maarten’s mountain of trash, waste invades a pristine Caribbean landscape. Sánchez’s ongoing juxtaposition between pristine landscapes and ominous wastescapes, reveals a tension deserves further exploration as Caribbean material culture. While tackling the realities of waste on a policy level remain important, it is both urgent and necessary to cultivate more dynamic dialogues grounded in political ecology, history and decolonization
ADDITIONAL READING AND RESOURCES
JOURNAL ARTICLES
Campbell, A (2019) Atlantic exchanges: The poetics of dispersal and disposal in Scottish and Caribbean seas, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 55:2, 195-208, DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2019.1590622
Jaffe, R. (2006) Global Environmental Ideoscapes, Blighted Cityscapes: City, Island and Environment in Jamaica and Curaçao. Etnofoor, 19(2), 113–129. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25758123
Kortenaar, N. ten. (1996). Where the Atlantic Meets the Caribbean: Kamau Brathwaite’s “The Arrivants” and T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Research in African Literatures, 27(4), 15–27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3819982
Manglou, M. & Rocher, L. & Bahers, J., (2022) “Waste colonialism and metabolic flows in island territories”, Journal of Political Ecology 29(1), 1-19. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.2836
Muñoz Martínez, Y. (2022) Gardening in Polluted Tropics: The Materiality of Waste and Toxicity in Olive Senior’s Caribbean Poetry. ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 21(2), 162–179. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.21.2.2022.3907
Reno, J., (2018) What is Waste?. Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 1(1), p.1.DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/wwwj.9
BOOKS
Jaffe, Rivke, ' Colonial Landscapes of Paradise and Pollution', Concrete Jungles: Urban Pollution and the Politics of Difference in the Caribbean, Global and Comparative Ethnography (New York, 2016; online edn, Oxford Academic, 19 May 2016), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190273583.003.0003, accessed 14 Feb. 2023.
SHELLER, M. (2020). Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv17z84n5
ONLINE ARTICLES
https://inthesetimes.com/article/haiti-earthquake-recovery-us-aid-anniversay-military-waste
https://www.recycling-magazine.com/2021/03/19/fixing-the-caribbeans-solid-waste-problem/.
https://edgeeffects.net/caribbean-wastescapes/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/07/27/magazine/barbados-climate-debt-mia-mottley.html
https://inthesetimes.com/article/haiti-earthquake-recovery-us-aid-anniversay-military-waste
https://jamaica.loopnews.com/content/riverton-city-dump-be-taken-out-service-holness