By Breaking Belize News Staff (HP): One million views and counting. That is the audience for travel influencer Drew Binsky’s reel ranking the Caribbean’s dirtiest cities, with Belize City sitting at number two behind Georgetown, Guyana, and our canals cast in the starring role as what he called giant illegal trash cans overloaded with trash.
Mayor Bernard Wagner is having none of it. “No credible study or scientific method has been provided to support that ranking,” he responded, pointing to the City Council’s “robust garbage collection programme and cleanup” and insisting that when hotspots or informal dumpsites are identified, “we tackle them immediately.”
The mayor has a fair point. Binsky’s list is content, not science, no criteria, no data, no methodology, built by a creator with nine million followers who understands exactly what travels online. Call it clickbait and you would not be wrong.
But here is the uncomfortable part every Belize City resident already knows: he did not need a study to film those canals. The footage stings precisely because it is familiar. The canals have been the city’s open wound for generations, and no amount of pushback at a ranking changes what floats through them after a heavy rain.
So maybe both things are true at once. The ranking is unserious, and the problem it spotlighted is deadly serious. City Hall collects the garbage, but the garbage in the canals did not fall from the sky, it was thrown there, bag by bag, by residents. A cleanup programme can only outrun a littering culture for so long.
A million strangers have now seen our canals. The better question is what the people who live beside them, and the council that manages them, do next.
Be honest, Belize City: whose job is it to fix the canals, City Hall’s or ours? Sound off below.
The post Belize City ranked second dirtiest in the Caribbean by travel influencer appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
By Breaking Belize News Staff (HP): One million views and counting. That is the audience for travel influencer Drew Binsky’s reel ranking the Caribbean’s dirtiest cities, with Belize City sitting at number two behind Georgetown, Guyana, and our canals cast in the starring role as what he called giant illegal trash cans overloaded with trash.
The post Belize City ranked second dirtiest in the Caribbean by travel influencer appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.