Dear Editor,
The garbage situation on Sint Maarten has been a serious concern for some time, and in recent weeks it has become harder to ignore. Piles have been building up in Cole Bay and other neighborhoods, contractual disputes between government and the local waste haulers have moved into public view, and the landfill itself has been described in recent reporting as being in a precarious state.
I want to read this alongside another story currently in the international news, because the two echo. Over the past few days, media and health authorities have been covering a cluster of Andes hantavirus cases connected to the MV Hondius, a Dutch-flagged cruise vessel, with several passenger fatalities following travel in South America. Investigators in Argentina now believe the outbreak began with a 70-year-old Dutch ornithologist and his wife who visited a rat-infested landfill just outside Ushuaia, in the days before boarding the ship. The landfill is a known birding site, since rare Patagonian species are drawn to the waste, which is what brought the couple there. Authorities suspect they inhaled aerosolized particles from the urine and droppings of rats carrying the Andes strain of hantavirus. The husband died on the ship; his wife died two weeks later.
This particular outbreak started at a pile of garbage that produced enough rats to sustain a viral reservoir, in a place ordinary visitors walked into. That is the part Sint Maarten should be reading carefully. Hantavirus is the headline, and I am being careful with the word, but closer to home leptospirosis is also worth mentioning, since it spreads through water and soil contaminated by rodent urine and shows up in the Caribbean regularly. There is no outbreak here, and I am not insinuating there is, but the conditions that allow these diseases to circulate are present on this island.
For a country that sits within the Kingdom of the Netherlands and ranks among the busiest cruise destinations in the Caribbean, this is worth thinking about. Thousands of visitors move every week through ports and an airport that empty into the same streets, drains, and shorelines residents live with year-round. None of this is meant as criticism of the cruise sector, which remains a central pillar of our economy, supporting employment, businesses, government revenue, and thousands of livelihoods. The argument is simpler: a destination that depends this heavily on tourism needs strong environmental and sanitation standards, because that is how an industry like this is protected over time. When large numbers of people move through concentrated urban and coastal spaces, the basics matter — regular waste collection, clean public areas, working drainage, healthy ecosystems — and they are part of what visitors are actually paying for.
The current crisis is also a chance to stop treating waste management as a standalone sanitation issue and start treating it as part of a wider conversation about sustainability and resilience. Better waste systems give us environmental protection, climate adaptation, public health preparedness, tourism stability, and stronger communities at the same time. We already know what happens when our environmental vulnerabilities meet our economic and infrastructure pressures, because Irma made that lesson clear, and climate change continues to add pressure in ways that make integrated environmental management a present-day requirement. Clean-up campaigns and reactive sweeps after public frustration have never carried this conversation forward. The actual path runs through long-term planning, real investment in infrastructure, stronger enforcement against illegal dumping, public awareness, and the modernization of waste systems we have been discussing for years.
Sint Maarten’s environmental and economic futures rest on the same foundations. The garbage problem deserves a steady, serious response, well past any single news cycle, because environmental management is one of the basic things a country like ours has to get right. A landfill at the end of the world has just made the case for taking ours, and our garbage situation in general, much more seriously.
Tadzio Bervoets
