Earth Today | When hurricane relief becomes waste | News
WHEN A hurricane passes through the Caribbean, our immediate focus is rightly on saving lives, restoring access, and getting critical supplies to affected communities. But, once the floodwaters recede and emergency response shifts into recovery, another crisis often begins to emerge, one that receives far less attention: waste.
Post-storm, Caribbean islands can generate 10 times their annual waste volume in days. In 2017, Hurricane Irma left 2.5 million cubic yards of debris on St.Maarten, the equivalent of years of normal waste. Hurricane Maria produced 6.2 million cubic yards in Puerto Rico, while Hurricane Dorian left The Bahamas with 1.5 million cubic metres. Recently, Hurricane Melissa generated 4.8 million tonnes in Jamaica, highlighting the immense disaster-waste burden now facing small island states.
After a storm, islands can generate months’ worth of garbage in days, as ruined furniture, roofing, and emergency supplies overwhelm fragile waste systems. Though the Caribbean is highly disaster-prone, recovery is rarely linked to environmental management. Inbound relief arrives quickly but, without systems to manage the aftermath, waste piles up before supplies even reach communities.
Focusing solely on emergency response without waste recovery is like trying to mop up water without fixing the leak. For nations with limited landfill capacity, these massive volumes are crippling.
Globally, up to 30 per cent of the weight of emergency relief supplies consists of single-use packaging that never leaves distribution sites or immediately overwhelms local disposal systems. We witnessed this first-hand at a regional warehouse mobilising emergency aid through the Caribbean Biodiversity Fund. Before supplies even reached communities, waste was piling up around us with plastic wrap, cardboard, foam, pallets, and bottles. This exposes a critical truth, that disaster response and waste management cannot be treated as separate conversations.
CIRCULAR ECONOMY
This is where a circular economy becomes vital. A circular economy views waste as a resource to be reduced, reused, repaired, or recycled. A circular approach is not just about clean-up. Supporting both smarter recovery and proactive, preventive risk management is also key.
Across the Caribbean, we must explore proactive solutions: building systems to recover post-disaster debris, improving debris sorting, and keeping waste out of landfills and waterways. In an emergency, waste management should never compete with saving lives. That is precisely why robust, easy-to-use systems must be established before disasters strike, ensuring they do not add to the burden during a crisis.
At the Caribbean Biodiversity Fund, through the Advancing Circular Economy Facility, we are increasingly looking at how disaster recovery and environmental resilience must go hand-in-hand. Hurricanes are becoming more intense, and recovery cannot simply mean returning to the same systems that left communities vulnerable in the first place.
Contributed by Rachel Ramsey, nature-based economies programme manager, Caribbean Biodiversity Fund