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How Trash Becomes Wealth: A New Generation of Haitians Leads Climate Action
The waterways and streets need to be cleared of their pollution for Haiti to maintain its pristine beauty
Haiti is beautiful, but an undeniable reality casts a shadow over her red clay hills, blue waters, and giving people: waste. From the streets of Port-au-Prince to small beach towns in Grand Goâve, piles of trash composed of plastic bottles from popular American companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi and odd household items take their place alongside the country’s bold limestone mountains.
This piling up — of plastic goods, styrofoam containers, and sometimes, human waste — has been happening since I was born in La Vallée, Jacmel, 27 years ago. But it wasn’t until I visited Haiti in 2017, after having been gone for several years, that I recognized the obvious problem.
Although I always said I’d never visit my Ayiti Cheri on a mission trip, my job placed me in the company of White missionaries that fall. As I watched foreign eyes gawk at trash mountains, the image of my perfect country started to shift. It became clear that my native home was in the midst of an environmental crisis.
Sitting on the west side of the island of Hispaniola, Haiti houses more than 11.3 million resilient people. However, the country has one dump. This single site is located in Port-au-Prince and is barely enough to service the capital city’s 2.7 million residents.
Without sufficient waste management or a sophisticated recycling system, the populace has ultimately decided to dump trash seemingly everywhere. But why is this the norm?
Serge Renaud, the co-founder of the National Alliance for the Advancement of Haitian Professionals (NAAHP), recalled a time during his youth, 20 years ago, when small-village mayors worked with their constituents to ease the burden of dumping, though it’s unclear how. However, we both remembered smelling burnt trash growing up, which is another way villagers still deal with waste, though these practices weren’t always the standard.
My grandparents, Le Pere and Ti Gran, lived in a three-room shack made of locally available, nontoxic materials. When Ti Gran sent us home with…
