By Laure Behar, Manager, Climate Resilience, Waste and Water (CREW) Department
Tourism is often described as the lifeblood of Caribbean economies. It creates jobs, generates foreign exchange, contributes to government revenues, and supports the livelihoods of thousands of people across the region. For many Small Island Developing States (SIDS), tourism is not simply an economic sector, it is a cornerstone of national resilience and development.
Few places illustrate this reality more clearly than Antigua and Barbuda, which is frequently cited as one of the most tourism-dependent economies in the world. Tourism accounts for an estimated 80% of GDP through its direct, indirect, and induced impacts (Tourism Analytics, n.d.). Across the Caribbean, the importance of the sector has also been recognized internationally through the United Nations’ Global Tourism Resilience Day initiative, which highlights tourism’s role in supporting sustainable development and resilience in SIDS.
Figure 1: Tourism total contribution to GDP, in Caribbean countries
There is little doubt that tourism will remain central to the Caribbean’s economic future. Yet as countries continue to attract visitors, expand infrastructure, and invest in tourism growth, there is another reality that deserves equal attention: waste.
The truth is that tourism and waste are inseparable. Every visitor contributes to economic activity, but every visitor also consumes resources and generates waste. The more successful a destination becomes, the more pressure it places on local waste management systems. For Caribbean islands with limited land, finite resources, and already strained infrastructure, this is a challenge we can no longer afford to overlook.
The relationship between tourism growth and waste generation is straightforward. More visitors mean more food consumed, more beverages purchased, more packaging discarded, more single-use products utilized, and ultimately more waste entering local disposal systems.
Evidence from across the region confirms this connection. In Saint Lucia, tourists have been reported to generate approximately twice as much solid waste per capita as local residents, while cruise ship passengers can generate up to four times more waste per day than Caribbean residents (Impact of Tourism in the Caribbean).
As visitor arrivals increase, the cumulative impact on waste infrastructure becomes increasingly visible. In Antigua and Barbuda, for example, more than 1,200 tonnes of waste from cruise ships were reportedly delivered to the national landfill in a single year (BBC Worklife, 2025).
In destinations where visitor arrivals rival—or even exceed—the resident population, the implications become even more pronounced. Saint Kitts and Nevis receives an average of approximately 88,760 visitors each month, despite having a resident population of only about 50,000 people (Tourism Analytics, n.d.; Worldometer, n.d.). While visitors are temporary, their impact on consumption patterns is not. They increase demand for food, water, packaging, transportation, accommodation, and countless other goods and services, all of which contribute to local waste generation.
These examples point to a simple but important reality: tourism growth and waste generation are closely linked. If one expands, the other inevitably follows. The question is not whether tourism creates waste; it is whether our waste management systems are evolving quickly enough to keep pace.
Addressing tourism-related waste is about more than improving collection services or finding additional landfill space. It requires a shift in thinking, from managing waste after it is created to preventing waste in the first place and recovering value from materials that would otherwise be discarded.
One of the most obvious opportunities lies in reducing single-use products.
Governments across the Caribbean have already begun taking action. Several countries have introduced restrictions on single-use plastics and polystyrene products. Saint Lucia, for example, implemented restrictions on selected single-use plastic and styrofoam products as part of broader efforts to reduce waste and marine pollution (UNEP & WTTC, 2021).
However, policy alone is not enough. The tourism industry itself has an important role to play. Guidance developed by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) demonstrates that tourism businesses can significantly reduce waste generation by eliminating unnecessary single-use products and adopting reusable alternatives (UNEP & WTTC, 2021).
The solutions are neither complex nor unrealistic. Hotels can replace individual toiletry bottles with refillable dispensers. Restaurants can reduce disposable food-service items. Resorts can provide water refill stations that encourage guests to use reusable bottles. Small operational changes, implemented at scale, can result in significant reductions in waste generation.
Food waste represents another major opportunity.
Hotels, restaurants, resorts, and cruise operations generate substantial quantities of organic waste every day. Recognizing the scale of the challenge, UN Tourism developed the Global Roadmap for Food Waste Reduction in the Tourism Sector, which encourages tourism businesses to measure, prevent, and reduce food waste throughout their operations (UN Tourism, 2022).
Momentum is also building within the Caribbean. A regional initiative supported by the Caribbean Biodiversity Fund and tourism partners was recently launched to promote sustainable food waste management practices across the sector (Caribbean Biodiversity Fund, 2025).
Among the available solutions, composting deserves particular attention. Diverting organic waste from landfills reduces disposal costs, decreases methane emissions, and creates a valuable resource that can be used in agriculture, landscaping, and soil restoration. Instead of viewing food waste as a liability, we can begin treating it as an asset.
Figure 2: World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance, 2024
This brings us to an even broader opportunity: the circular economy.
Traditional waste management systems tend to focus on disposal. Circular economy approaches focus on value creation. Rather than treating waste as the end of a product’s life cycle, they seek ways to reuse, recycle, remanufacture, and recover resources that would otherwise be lost.
In Saint Kitts and Nevis, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has supported initiatives exploring circular business models designed to recover value from waste streams while creating local economic opportunities (IUCN, 2025). This work has included assessing opportunities for products manufactured from recycled plastics and identifying business models capable of supporting their long-term viability, an initiative to which Unite Caribbean contributed.
These efforts demonstrate that effective waste management is not merely an environmental necessity. It can also support entrepreneurship, create jobs, stimulate innovation, and improve resource efficiency.
Yet perhaps the most important lesson is that tourism and waste management should never be planned separately.
Tourism strategies determine how many visitors a destination seeks to attract, what infrastructure is built, and how consumption patterns evolve. Waste management strategies determine how the resulting materials are prevented, collected, treated, recycled, and disposed of. One influences the other at every stage.
This is why tourism growth, and waste management must be planned together.
Saint Kitts and Nevis offers an encouraging example, where updates to the Tourism Sector Strategy are being linked with the development of a Waste Management Strategy and Action Plan. This type of integrated planning should not be the exception; it should become the norm across the Caribbean.
The conversation must also include financing.
Waste management has real costs, and those costs cannot be borne solely by governments and local taxpayers when a significant portion of the pressure comes from tourism activity. Tourism-related environmental levies, sustainability funds, and other financing mechanisms can help ensure that tourism revenues contribute directly to maintaining the environmental infrastructure upon which the industry depends.
Ultimately, the most effective waste management strategy is still the simplest one: prevent waste from being generated in the first place.
If the Caribbean is serious about sustainable tourism, then sustainability must extend beyond marketing campaigns and eco-labels. It must be reflected in everyday decisions and operations: reducing single-use products, minimizing food waste, investing in refillable systems, sourcing locally, composting organic materials, and supporting circular economy solutions.
The Caribbean does not need to choose between tourism development and environmental protection. But it does need to stop treating them as separate priorities.
Tourism will remain one of the defining pillars of Caribbean economies for decades to come. Ensuring that tourism growth also strengthens waste management systems is not an environmental luxury, it is an economic necessity. The resilience and sustainability of our island destinations depend on it.
