Jamaican Businessman Organizes Trash-Collecting Tournament, Removes Over 11,000 Lbs Of Trash From Sea

May 29, 2019

Jamaican fishers collected a whopping 11,336 pounds of trash from the surface of the sea during the 2019 Kingston Harbour Trash Tournament.

Credit: Gladstone Taylor / The Gleaner

The tournament, which has no entrance fee, is the brainchild of sport fishing enthusiast Brandon McKoy.

"I never in a million years expected to see the amount of participation as I did – the amount of onlookers on the crowd when we got back and the amount of trash," McKoy told The Gleaner. "And if you talk to any team, they’ll tell you that we barely dented it."

McKoy believes the trash tournaments are helping but are not the solution to the crisis.

"The solution cannot possibly be that we have to have a tournament every weekend to clean the garbage and keep it clean. The solution lies in the method of preventing it completely from getting into the sea in the first place," he said.