It is a phrase we use every day without much thought. We tell our children to throw their garbage away. We put it out for collection and trust that it will be taken away. We finish a drink, toss the bottle on the side of the road, and move on with our lives.

But where exactly is "away"?

Over the past few years, I have spent time helping to clean up Refuge Cay, a small mangrove island within the Palisadoes-Port Royal Protected Area in Kingston Harbour. What I have learned there is that away is not an abstract concept. Away is a real place. Sometimes it is a gully. Sometimes it is a beach, and sometimes it is a mangrove island where decades of discarded waste have become trapped among the roots of a fragile ecosystem.