By the Caribbean Journal staff

Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller has set up an Inter-Ministerial Committee to develop a programme to push cleanup activities across the island nation.

The committee will include an island-wide public education campaign focusing on the importance of proper solid waste management.

“The public education campaign is going to ensure that persons understand how to clean up the environment safely, how to dispose of their garbage properly, how to containerise it and ensure storage until it is collected, to reduce the presence of breeding sites for our many vectors that carry diseases,” said Dr Marion Bullock, director of disaster, emergency and special services at the Ministry of Health.

The move follows a call in January by Foreign Minister AJ Nicholson to develop an island-wide cleanup project.

“We haven’t taken care of the gifts that God has given us,” he said at the time. “We have a dirty country.”

The committee will include representatives from the Office of the Prime Minister and the Ministries of Local Government, Education and Agriculture along with members from the National Solid Waste Management Authority, the Jamaica Information Service, the Food Storage Division and the Kingston & St Andrew Corporation.