Michael McCarthy: Restoring harbours, saving futures

The Palisades Road is a thin ribbon of asphalt between two versions of Jamaica. On one side, the Caribbean Sea reaches toward the horizon, a deceptive sapphire mask; on the other, the Kingston Harbour exhales the heavy, metallic scent of sixty years of industrial neglect and community desperation.

This is not the Jamaica of the glossy travel brochures with their filtered turquoise shallows. This is the reality of a messy space, a term that Michael McCarthy, Managing Director of Clean Harbours Jamaica Limited, uses with a visceral cringe that betrays his clinical, colour-coordinated obsession with order. For Michael, a man who organizes his closet by sleeve length and his socks by shade, the chaotic sprawl of plastic bobbing in the harbour is a personal affront to his spirit.

Born in Kingston thirty-nine years ago, Michael’s life has been a slow-motion immersion into the water-bearer identity of his Aquarian sun sign. While others see the sea as a backdrop for leisure, Michael sees a home that has been desecrated. His foundation was built on the rigid discipline of his father, and the exacting standards of his mother. They taught him that anything worth doing was worth doing well, a philosophy he now applies to the Herculean task of filtering millions of pounds of waste from the arteries of his nation. His connection to the water is spiritual, a calming effect that centers his aura, yet his work is defined by the high-tension friction of resistance and political inertia.

This work is a mission born from conviction and profound frustration. Michael, a senior marine engineer and captain, spent years at sea, witnessing how developed nations protected their waterways as their most precious real estate. Returning home, he found a colonial legacy that had taught Jamaicans to turn their backs on the harbour, treating it as a sink for the city’s gullies rather than the heart of its economy. He co-founded Clean Harbours Jamaica (CHJ) with a core group of like-minded mariners who realized that if they destroyed the ocean, they destroyed their own livelihoods.

The work itself is tangible and gritty. It is re-engineering the future of the Caribbean. CHJ manages Interceptors, massive, high-tech strainers provided through an alliance with The Ocean Cleanup and the GraceKennedy Foundation. These devices are deployed at the mouths of the largest gullies, the concrete veins that carry the city’s discarded plastics and runoff into the sea. To a fifteen-year-old, the mechanism is simple: it catches the trash before it can escape into the open ocean, preventing nearly 6 million pounds of waste from choking the harbour, but the implementation is anything but simple. The technology, designed in the Netherlands, originally failed to account for the unique, special ferocity of Jamaican gully runoff. Michael and his team had to go back to the drawing board, innovating and re-engineering the systems to survive the local environment.

The stakes are existential. Jamaica’s identity is inextricably linked to its coastline, yet the banking sector originally refused to recognize the value of maritime assets, forcing Michael to go door-to-door, enduring proverbial “No’s” from institutions that claimed to be green until he asked for the capital to prove it. This is the paper wall of resistance, a systemic failure to understand that without pristine beaches, the tourism economy is a house of cards. Michael argues that we celebrate sixty years of independence, yet we have endured “Sixty years of pollution,” a historical stain that requires more than just government talk to remove. It requires a shift in the national psyche.

Critically, this is not a story of a solitary saviour. Michael rejects the saviour narrative, emphasizing instead the family atmosphere of his team and the agency of the local community. He speaks of security guards who, on their days off, volunteer to sort garbage because they have begun to believe in the dream. He speaks of the camaraderie formed through the shared heartbreak of seeing Hurricane Melissa damage their Interceptors and release captured waste back into the water. Michael McCarthy has helped to create a growing network of waste champions who no longer see environmental work as a chore; they now see it as a natural extension of self-love.

However, the tension remains unresolved. Michael’s vision extends to becoming the premier marine waste provider for the entire Caribbean, but he is haunted by the question of sustainability. “It takes cash to care,” he notes bluntly, and the project currently relies on international partners and private foundations rather than being fully integrated into the national infrastructure. He worries whether he will be around long enough to see the vision through, or if the drive will vanish if he stops pushing. He is chasing a memory he never actually got to have: the Kingston Harbour his grandfather swam in, a pristine sanctuary that exists for Michael only in stories.

Success, for Michael, is when there is less work because there is less garbage to collect. He envisions a future where his children can carry him out to the water and see people once again immersed in an environment that was once considered a tomb. Until then, he remains a man doing his best to bring order to a messy world, fueled by a passion that others might find uncool, but that he considers a lifestyle.

He recalls the bottle caps his team turned into a mural, a vibrant mosaic of what was once discarded. He thinks of the plastic bottles now serving as benches, a literal foundation for rest built from the debris of a consumerist culture. Then he looks back at the water, where the Interceptors sit, waiting for the next rain to wash the city’s sins back toward the sea.

The mural is beautiful, but the gully is still flowing.

The ghost of his grandfather is still waiting by the shore for a water that is safe enough to hold him.