Recycling

I'm just back from visiting my daughter's family in Canada, where I made the comment that Calgary's neighborhoods seemed more clean and orderly than most.  Almost no graffiti.  Very little in the way of roadside trash.  I guessed that our northern neighbors must have a better attitude about littering and lots of incentives for recycling.

Turns out the facts support some of this opinion.  My son-in-law explained Canada's program for returning bottles, cans, and even  boxed beverages containers--a comprehensive attempt to encourage folks to reuse and repurpose materials.  Such programs are also becoming more common in the U. S. Oregon and California, Hawaii and a number of other states charge bottle deposits and give return credit.  A no-brainer, really, although I'm sure that somewhere an Ayn Rand devotee is foaming at the mouth as I write this, purple with offense.  Equally sensible are strictures on plastic grocery bags--now outlawed in Hawaii and several California locales, as well as in many European countries, although not yet in Canada.  

Plastic grocery bags make my jaws clench.  Ever since my first visit to Nicaragua in 2005, I have found them especially offensive.  Riding the bus north out of Managua, I passed several miles of open fields strewn with plastic trash.  The barbed wire fences at the edge of the highway were covered with the flimsy bags, flapping in the breeze like prayer flags in hell.  The Nicaraguans have a habit of tossing wrappers, cigarettes, newspapers, old clothes, food scraps, just about anything really out of bus and car windows.  The canals in Managua are little more than trash receptacles.  The government has recently launched a campaign to encourage citizens to recycle and place trash in garbage cans, but a businessman I met my last trip said there is still a long way to go.  Later that afternoon, watching our driver chuck candy wrappers out the window confirmed that bad habits die hard.

Who are the people responsible for trashing the highways and byways?  Having traveled extensively in developing countries, I know that in smaller, especially rural communities local markets and subsistence farmers rarely deal with packaging of any kind.  They carry their own carts and baskets to shop, choosing from produce that has not been packaged or processed, thus nipping the potential for littering at the bud.  The meanest of shacks I have visited are almost always swept clean and neatly arranged inside.  That's not to say that there is no garbage lying about.  Rural folks toss garbage into jungles and farmyards, depending on natural decay and scavengers to clean up after them.  The problem is that population density creates an imbalance.  Too many people in one place create too much garbage and the toss-to-clean-up ratio tips towards trash.  It's easy to understand how the waves of poor that have flocked to cities worldwide bring their habits with them, resulting in accumulated garbage that cannot be wiped away by any passive process.

But the mountains of trash that threaten to bury the earth and create islands of garbage in the sea come predominantly from the well-to-do.  They just do a better job of hiding most of it in landfills and waterways, abandoned mine shafts and open ocean.  By an odd twist, in urban areas at least, the desperately poor are more likely to see trash as a treasure.  That is definitely true in Managua, where a large community of about 1700 poor people glean trash from La Chureca, the main dump in Managua, hoping to find something of value to sell or reuse.  I went there with a donor group I was part of a couple of years ago.  We hired a driver to take us through the dump in the early morning.  Families live in tin shacks along the road leading to the smoldering mountains of trash.  My impression from the minute we entered this area was of people scurrying everywhere.   Everyone seemed busy loading or unloading, sorting through mounds of collected items, intent on making a living performing what they may not have realized was a laudable task--recycling what was useful, giving garbage a second or third or fourth life.

The pictures I have posted here give a sense of La Chureca's nightmarish commotion.  Fires smolder day and night, obscuring the sun and filling the lungs.  Buzzards perch in random clumps, lurching about in their cocky assurance of a hearty meal.  Children work beside adults, dodging bulldozers and horse-drawn carts.  The carts are stacked with giant sacks of reclaimed garbage, bound for resale or recycling.

The morning we drove through La Chureca in 2010, I was unaware of plans by the government to relocate the families who lived around the dump.  A visit by the Spanish vice-president in 2007 prompted Spain to commit $30 million to covering the dump, building a recycling facility, and providing jobs and housing for the people in the area.  Work on that project has begun (see: video).   Locals are evidently being assisted in finding new employment.  But if areas of the dump had in fact been sealed off before our visit, we did not see them.  And the numbers of persons still gleaning items seemed undiminished.  The fact is that many residents remain skeptical of being relocated and retrained.  One woman we spoke with by the side of the road questioned where she and others like her would go if the dump is closed.  I imagine she was voicing a common fear:  that what little the people living around La Chureca possess--rudimentary shelter and a difficult livelihood-- is being taken from them without recompense.

People make messes, rich people more than poor ones.  Our market-driven world is a paragon of wastefulness.  As more countries hop on the consumerism bandwagon, it would be best if new wealth did not also bring environmental and social destruction--pollution of the air and water, disintegration of customs, a worship of self-gratification and denigration of collective effort.  Prosperity for some creates misery for others, those left behind to fend for themselves.

But occasionally communities tackle the consequences of prosperity with braod-minded solutions.  Ideas as simple as "Adopt-a-Highway" clean-up brigades enlist responsible citizens to fight the good fight against trash.  Clothing, shopping bags, furniture, building materials, and even art made from recycled materials are now commonplace, a boon to both the people who use them second time around and to the environment that does not have to suffocate under their disposal.  (I'm thinking of a purse my wife bought in Europe that is made from recycled trucking tarps.)  I recently read of a sidewalk that generates power with every pedestrian footstep--a clever way to put us all to work and guarantee that no unharnessed energy is wasted.  Of course, these changes do not guarantee that every reusable item or potentially usable effort finds a second life.  We still thoughtlessly consume, waste, and discard too much.

My daughter laughed when I  said that Canadians seemed to take better care of their neighborhoods.  When her family first moved to Calgary in January, she said that every snowbank was littered with discarded cigarette packs and paper coffee cups, along with whatever else had either blown in or been dropped from a car window over the winter.  Her husband said that shortly after they arrived, he took two large garbage bags with him on a walk with the kids to a nearby neighborhood park.  They picked up garbage on their way to and from the park, completely filling one bag and most of the second.

Springtime and warmer weather seem to have lessened the trash on the streets in their suburban neighborhood.  So maybe it's about weather-related moods, depressing winters that suck the will out of the best-intentioned.  There may be other factors, but in the end, it always comes down to human choices and behavior.  I laud those, like the people behind the Spanish-sponsored project in Nicaragua, who not only seek a way to solve the problem of commercial waste, but also address the waste of lives thrown on the trash heap by greed, neglect, inequality, and lack of opportunity.  Recycling is, in a sense, rebirth.  And there are far too many people, as well as things, that need a second chance.  That broad vision is what responsible recycling should be about.