The burden of trash

Back in the states, it was so easy to forget about waste. It seemed as though putting it in one of those nice bins was enough to take care of it forever. Life here serves as a constant reminder of how false that is.

Vegetable waste is usually the easiest. By tossing it out the window, a goat or chicken is sure to come and enjoy a nice meal. Meat waste attracts puppies, except if you produce too much, the dogs start to become aggressive when their gravy train stops. The rest is much more difficult.

A lot of things come in plastic containers. In a lot of places, the paths are just littered with plastic water bottles (locals drink very little bottled water, so it tends to be a rule of thumb that concentrations of water bottles is pretty directly correlated with concentrations of tourists). One of the reasons that I tend to be so impatient with safari-going tourists (and unenthusiastic about safaris myself) is that I know the numbers of plastic bottles of water they typically consume and where those bottles are going to end up. Don't get me wrong, I would be pretty anxious if drinks weren't packaged well here. But if I want to throw something away, there's no away.

Sodas are nice. They mostly come in glass bottles, which are washed and reused. (Reuse is different from recycling, since it's not converted into another product--think of aluminum cans. When those are recycled, they are melted down and turned into another aluminum product.) Although the extra weight of glass bottles means that with all the transport to and from bottling facilities, there is extra fuel expended on the big trucks that ship them, that's more forgettable than seeing plastic bottles on the ground. (In Kenya, most places let you buy sodas in either glass or plastic bottles, while in Tanzania plastic soda bottles are almost unheard of, but cans are much more common than in Kenya. I could actually write a whole blog post about soda, but that might try everyone's attention span.)

In general, the solution is to burn the plastic and paper trash. I admit that I have dropped my fair share of litter around cities as I've traveled. (Not something I'm proud of, but I feel like I became much more of a litter-bug when I started spending time over here and picked up some unsavory habits from the locals. Of course, they probably picked it up from Westerners, so I can't pass the buck on this one.) Recycling paper and plastic (and even metal) is virtually non-existent everywhere that I've lived for the past 16 months. Heaps of trash are bad for the soil (especially things like styrofoam which don't really decompose), invite pests (which can lead to diseases) like rodents and insects and are considered socially unacceptable. Burning them produces some unpleasant smoke (which is surely nature's way of telling me that this isn't the right thing to do either), but at least it provides some kind of away.

Today, I got a bit of my comeuppance for being part of the problem. As I tried to move some of our trash around (the juice cartons were difficult because they came with foil liners; the poor product design is making me resistant to buying Del Monte juices over here), I grabbed what I thought was a paper part of the carton (which I expected to be pretty warm) but turned out to be made of plastic. The plastic melted onto my thumb and gave me a pretty unpleasant burn (fortunately it wasn't burning too hot, so the burn wasn't too nasty).

For all the work on finding new ways to reuse or recycle plastic bottles and other abundant waste products, I feel that the burden should really be on the companies to design containers that have a logical function after they're used (one of the coolest examples I've seen is biodegradable juice cartons that encourage users to use them to plant a tree), instead of just cluttering the ground and the atmosphere.