Forty Years of Coastal Cleanup Day: Why Jamaica’s Annual Battle Against Marine Plastic Has Never Felt More Urgent

Briefing

• Coastal Cleanup Day 2025 mobilises over 12,000 volunteers across Jamaica.
• Single-use plastics and foam account for over 60% of debris collected.
• Sargassum mats trap waste, making cleanup vastly more difficult than in past years.
• Jamaica Environment Trust coordinates national effort on third Saturday of September.
• Volunteer numbers rising, but so is the tonnage of waste on Jamaica’s beaches.

On the third Saturday of September 2025, before the sun had properly cleared the Blue Mountains to the east, volunteers were already wading knee-deep in the shallows at Rose Hall in Montego Bay, pulling plastic bottles, foam containers, and knotted masses of fishing line from the margins of the sea. The scene repeated itself at more than 130 sites across Jamaica that morning, from the fishing beaches of Hellshire in St Catherine to the tourist sands of Ocho Rios and the community shoreline at Treasure Beach in St Elizabeth. In total, the Jamaica Environment Trust estimated that more than 12,000 people participated in the 2025 International Coastal Cleanup Day — the largest turnout in the event’s history in Jamaica.

The figures made compelling headlines. They also obscured a more difficult truth: the total volume of waste removed from Jamaica’s beaches in 2025 was higher than in any previous year, which meant that the record volunteer numbers were collecting record quantities of rubbish. The coastline was not getting cleaner. It was getting dirtier faster than the growing army of volunteers could keep pace with.

What the Data Shows

The Ocean Conservancy’s global cleanup data, to which Jamaica contributes, consistently finds that the top categories of debris on Caribbean coastlines are single-use plastic items: bottles, bags, straws, foam food containers, cigarette butts, and bottle caps. Jamaica’s 2025 cleanup confirmed the same pattern. Single-use plastics and polystyrene foam accounted for more than 60 per cent of items collected by number. Larger items — fishing gear, nets, tyres, household appliances — accounted for a smaller share by count but a significant proportion of total weight.

A complication that coordinators at several sites flagged in 2025 was the interaction between conventional beach debris and the year’s exceptional sargassum influx. Sargassum — the brown macroalgae arriving from the South Atlantic — forms dense mats in the surf zone and along the waterline that trap plastic and organic debris, making collection significantly more labour-intensive than when debris lies on open sand. Volunteers at several north coast sites reported spending twice as long per metre of beach as in previous years, working through sargassum tangles to extract embedded plastics.

The Upstream Problem

The International Coastal Cleanup Day is an exercise in symptom management. Its value is real — beaches with less debris are healthier ecosystems, safer for wildlife, and more attractive for tourism — but the event does not address the sources of coastal pollution. Jamaica produces an estimated 1.5 kilograms of solid waste per person per day, with collection rates in informal settlements and rural areas significantly lower than in urban centres. Uncollected waste enters river systems during rainfall events and reaches the coast within days, particularly during the June-to-November rainy and hurricane season. Without improvements in solid waste collection and river management, the rate at which debris reaches Jamaica’s beaches will continue to exceed the rate at which volunteers can remove it.

The National Environment and Planning Agency has for several years been developing a national marine litter action plan, and Jamaica has been involved in regional Caribbean frameworks for reducing plastic pollution. Progress on both fronts has been slower than environmental advocates have pushed for. Jamaica introduced a ban on certain single-use plastic items and plastic bags in 2019, which contributed to some measurable reduction in specific waste categories. But the structural drivers of marine pollution — inadequate waste collection infrastructure, poverty, the continued prevalence of single-use packaging in the formal and informal economy — remained substantially unchanged.

The volunteers at Rose Hall and Hellshire and Treasure Beach were not ignorant of these realities. Many of them had returned for the fifth or tenth consecutive year, collecting the same categories of debris from the same stretches of coast, watching the numbers in the press release grow year after year. They continued to come, they said, not because they believed one Saturday would solve the problem, but because a beach that is cleaned is at least better than a beach that is not — and because their presence, annually and visibly, was a form of insistence that the island’s coast belongs to everyone who cares for it.

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