Oxford Street residents battle endless garbage

The garbage on Oxford Street in Kingston tells its own story.

What was once a family home, destroyed by fire years ago, is now an open lot filled with trash, a place where flowers planted in painted drums to brighten the corner are quickly buried under rotting waste. On a recent visit, THE STAR team noticed scavengers sifting through the piles, while residents shook their heads. The smell clung to the air, mixing with smoke from small fires set to "cut down the nastiness".

"It nuh make no sense yuh clean it," sighed stall owner Tamone Harrison, who has lived and worked near the site for years. "As the people dem clean it, them start put garbage deh again. Mi nuh know weh so much people come from." Residents say garbage trucks pass through but barely scratch the surface.

"The truck came twice last month," Harrison recalled. "Dem could a only take up weh dem could manage. This need tractor and dumper truck because one garbage truck cya manage it."

Frustrated, neighbours have tried to create order. They cleared a small section, with the help of a police officer, so trucks could load waste more easily. But every effort is swallowed by the next heap of rubbish.

"Every minute people light it a fire because it looks disgusting," Harrison told THE STAR. "Sometimes we cya even sidung out yah so to how the place stink. Dead dog, dead puss, dead rat, all kind of things throw inna it."

Many blame the site's decline on the death of a man they knew only as Blacks, who they say worked with the Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation and became the street's guardian.

"He used to clean up every weh," Harrison recalled. "From him dead, about four years now, everything just go downhill." Residents say people from other communities now arrive to dump, sometimes sending children to discard bags late at night.

Amid the frustration, people cling to the hope that fencing the land could help. Under the National Solid Waste Management Act, anyone caught littering can be fined up to $2,000 for a first offence, while illegal dumping carries penalties as high as $1 million or imprisonment.

But, according to Audley Gordon, executive director of the National Solid Waste Management, enforcement alone cannot fix what has become a chronic national habit.

"Oxford Street is a very difficult space. It's abused by business people and by passers-by who find it convenient to dispose of garbage there. It's not necessarily the people from the area, it's usually a combination of people," he said, noting that the agency works with municipal councils but lacks the resources to return daily. "We probably would have to go there every day to keep it together, and even that would be a challenge because if you clean it in the morning, you might have a problem in the evening."

Gordon stressed that proper disposal begins at the household level, but too many Jamaicans refuse to containerise.

"About five per cent of Jamaicans do it properly; the rest simply don't prepare their garbage for collection," he said.

He added that the agency is expanding enforcement, training new officers and deploying motorbike patrols to respond quicker, but lasting change requires community participation.

"Cultures don't change overnight," he said. "Four thousand workers can't supervise 2.7 million people." Gordon also called for stiffer penalties as the current ones are not a deterrent.