Little steps towards a better world
I was still in elementary school when I first heard about recycling. The teacher explained how different materials belonged to different bins and that each one of them had a different colour. The green was for glass, the blue was for paper and cardboard, the yellow for plastic and metal and the red one for batteries. Even though most people were already recycling glass (as there were big containers to deposit glass spread throughout the neighbourhoods), the other materials were left out all together in the waste bin.
My generation was probably the first one that learned about it in school. When going home, I tried to explain to my mother that we should separate the trash. Unfortunately living in a small city didn’t give us that option because there were no recycling containers yet. Only a few years later the colourful bins started to be seen. However, there were only a few in the city and we had to drive to places in order to deposit the different materials. So we only recycled sometimes. We didn’t do our part because we had excuses: the bins were too far, we didn’t have much space in the kitchen to pile up the garbage, it would leave the house smelly or the myth that the trash would all end up mixed together at some point.
Only when I moved to Lisbon I started to separate the garbage as my condo had all the proper bins. I had no more excuses.
A couple years later I moved to Germany to study. Recycling was taken very seriously over there. There were specific days of the week/ month where the different trash had to be taken outside the house so that a truck would pass by and collect them. If the separation wasn’t well done and for instance the plastic bag had non-plastic items inside, we could be charged with a fine.
Nowadays my hometown has plenty of recycling bins and in Portugal there are currently more than 43 thousand bins spread out to all cities.
Slowly people in the western world started waking up for the importance of recycling, reusing and reducing. We have the infrastructures, the information, and the education, which means we shouldn’t have a single excuse not to do so.
Those who know me can testify that I avoid buying plastic at all cost, I bring my own fabric bags to the market and try to buy in bulk when possible. Currently I’m traveling in India and the reality here is very different. Buying bottles of water is something I need to on daily basis as the tap water can lack treatment and therefore is unfit for consumption. I’m not happy at all with the amount of trash I’m generating here and I still avoid plastic bags and straws for the most part. In some places is difficult to find trash bins, let alone recycling bins. The other day I bought a cake that was handed out to me in newspaper, after eating the cake I was searching for a bin and asked someone where I could find one. The answer I got was simply “you can just throw the trash on the floor because someone later will pick it up”. As much as this is not acceptable in my culture I have to be open enough to understand that things here work in another level. The streets are very dirty with all kinds of garbage, people throw waste through the car windows and I constantly step on trash. It becomes the norm after a couple weeks of travel.
I don’t have enough knowledge about the education in India as the only things I know are from asking people I’ve been meeting around. I came to know that in fact they now learn in school about recycling. Also there is a big campaign all over India called “Clean India Mission” and the logotype is Gandhi’s glasses with written “clean” and “India” in each lens to try to get people to place the garbage to where it belongs. India has a population of 1.37 Billion. New Delhi alone has around 11 million inhabitants (the same as Portugal) so I get that it might be very difficult to get everybody on the same page. Some basic needs are not even met for millions of people, let alone the concept of recycling.
In the western world we have the tools to do better, to reuse more, to buy less, to stop using plastic or at least drastically reduce its use. We sure have treated water in most places and buying a good water filter to get the purest form of water is an option. We no longer need to buy plastic bottled water, we can choose to buy the unwrapped fruits and veggies, we can buy in bulk, we can say “no” to plastic bags, straws, sanitary pads and tampons etc. We vote with our money every time we purchase an item. Alternatives are made all the time by big corporations because they will do everything and anything to make us buy their products. We cannot expect them to be the ones to stop selling bananas wrapped up in plastic. We have to take that responsibility ourselves. If they know that their consumers are not buying those bananas due to the plastic, they will take measures.
Recycling is great! But we know that some types of materials are not even recyclable, such as straws, plastic bags, coffee cups, tissues etc. So, better avoid buying it.
I’m not criticizing India by any means, in fact I’m thanking India for my first lesson. What I’m trying to say with this article is how sometimes seeing another realities makes us understand better that our own reality can make improvements too, specially when we have the power and tools to do so.
Here is a list for “zero waste” alternatives to make our lives easier: http://trashisfortossers.com/zero-waste-alternatives-ultimate-lis/
Do you do your part?
