Environmentalist calls for litter laws to be enforced

The president of the Environment Awareness Group (EAG), Tahambay Smith, is calling for authorities to move away from just lip service and begin enforcing anti-litter laws.
He was commenting on the accumulation of garbage in St John’s Harbour and popular lunch locations along the shell beach area, which were brought to the attention of OBSERVER media.

The ghastly sight of bottles, cans, household items, food containers and condom wrappers left in the various beachside locations has turned what would have been beautiful leisure locations into cesspools.
“We need to have the police enforce the laws on the books so where littering is a problem they deal with it,” Smith said.
One vendor at the West Bus Station told OBSERVER media a major contributor to the buildup of garbage in the harbour are bus drivers who throw their garbage on the ground instead of into trash receptacles.
 

“They come here and eat and through their garbage anywhere… in the drains… then the wind blows it to the back into the water,” she lamented. “The place is just nasty.”
Smith believes that the police could consider using drones and surveillance cameras to assist in apprehending guilty parties.
He said while some individuals will consider the idea an intrusion of privacy, “you either do the correct thing or you get policed into doing the correct thing”.
“We have to start holding these agencies accountable when it comes to enforcing these laws,” Smith added.
The environmentalist believes the time for campaigns is over and it is now time to take a stand on the issue of littering.

Smith said it appears that while some issues are seemingly on the front burner of law enforcement, other matters are left to languish.
“If we were serious about these matters, they would have been dealt with a long time ago,” he said.
The EAG president also said contractors also have a part to play in putting an end to illegal dumping, by monitoring the individuals they employ to dump debris from work sites and checking receipts to ensure the waste is taken to the Cooks Landfill