Back to the earth: why Barbados can’t afford to bag its green waste

Walk down almost any road in Barbados on collection day and you’ll see them: black plastic bags slumped at the gate, stuffed with grass cuttings, hedge trimmings, fallen leaves, palm fronds and kitchen scraps. They get lifted onto a truck, driven across the island and buried. It feels tidy. It is one of the most wasteful things we do.

Because what is inside those bags isn’t really rubbish. It’s the raw material of soil — and soil is something this island is running short of.

Our soil is thin, and it is leaving

Most of Barbados sits on a cap of coral limestone. The soil that covers it is, in many places, only a thin layer between the rock and the sky. In the Scotland District, where that coral cap has worn away, the ground is soft clay that slips and gullies with every heavy rain. Across the island, centuries of sugar cane, land clearing and now construction have stripped away organic matter and left soils that crust in the dry season and wash away in the wet.

Topsoil is not something we can manufacture quickly. Nature builds it slowly — a few centimetres can take hundreds of years. Yet a single tropical downpour on bare, tired ground can carry it off in an afternoon, down the gullies and out onto our reefs, where the sediment smothers the coral that protects our beaches.

A big country can afford to lose a little topsoil. A small island cannot. We only have what’s here.

Organic matter is what holds it all together

The single best thing we can give tired soil is organic matter: broken-down leaves, grass, wood and food, in the form of compost and mulch. It does work no bag of imported fertiliser can do.

• It holds water. Soil rich in organic matter acts like a sponge, soaking up rain and releasing it slowly. On one of the most water-scarce islands in the world, that matters for every farm, garden and hotel lawn.
• It holds the soil in place. Organic matter binds loose particles into crumbs that resist being washed or blown away.
• It feeds life. Worms, fungi and microbes turn dead material into nutrients plants can use, building fertility year after year instead of borrowing it from a sack.
• It keeps value on the island. Every load of compost made here is fertiliser and soil conditioner we don’t have to ship in.

What happens inside the bag

Now think about where those plastic bags end up. Buried in a landfill, sealed off from air, green waste can’t compost the way it would in a garden. Instead it rots slowly without oxygen, producing methane — a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide — and a liquid run-off known as leachate. On an island where much of our drinking water comes from the very limestone beneath our feet, that is not a small concern.

And it takes up room. Our landfill is small, and so is the island around it. There is no empty interior to move on to when it fills. Every cubic metre given over to grass clippings in plastic is a cubic metre we’ll need for something that genuinely can’t be recovered. The plastic bag itself only adds insult: it locks good material away and will outlast all of us.

Of all places in the world, a small island should not be burying its own soil in plastic.

Let nature do what it does best

The good news is that this is one of the easiest problems we have to solve, because nature already knows how. Given air, moisture and a little time, leaves and branches and grass decompose, break down and become earth again. That’s all composting is: getting out of the way and letting the cycle close.

At Island Cycle we do this at scale for hotels — collecting their garden waste, chipping it, building it into windrows and returning it as rich, living compost for their grounds. But everyone has a part to play:

• Leave grass clippings on the lawn. They break down in days and feed the grass they came from.
• Mulch with what you’ve got. Shredded leaves and fronds around trees and beds keep moisture in and weeds down.
• Start a compost heap. A corner of the yard and some kitchen scraps is all it takes.
• Never bag organic waste for the landfill. If it grew from the ground, it belongs back in the ground.
• Ask your hotel, school or business what they do with their green waste — and if the answer is “the dump,” point them our way.

Barbados has been shaped by its soil for as long as people have lived here. If we want it to keep feeding us, cooling us and holding our island together, we have to start giving back what we take. Send it back to the earth.