NIMBY

There is nothing that will raise your environmental consciousness as quickly as living in a city where there is no rubbish collection service. Anywhere.

Back home I was never much into ‘the environment’ and ‘pollution’ and ‘separating household rubbish’ to ‘save the planet for our children’ and what not. I recycled glass only because I could get fined if it was discovered in my rubbish bags by the rubbish police. True, I did stop short at tossing empty batteries in along with everything else, but other than that I pretty much couldn’t be bothered. Animal, mineral, vegetable, chemical: off it all went, snugly together in a stylish gray plastic bag to God knows where, to be dealt with in God knows what manner. Buried? Burned? Distributed amongst the poor? Couldn’t tell you, didn’t care.

What I can tell you though, is that all this changes when rubbish collection stops. And it becomes your personal responsibility to try and get rid of every single thing you bring into your house. Then, believe me, you start to care. With every plastic carrier bag they give you in shops, you agonise: “Oh no, not another plastic bag?! Where am I going to put that?!”

Fortunately I have discovered that a lot of the stuff you bring into your house, you can get rid off by eating it. I have tried this. This works. If you have a toilet connected to the city sewage system, so much the better. If not, eating will only offer temporary reprieve. But for everything that cannot be transported from your house through the plumbing, you must find another solution. That is to say: bury it, burn it, or distribute it amongst the poor. There are people in Lilongwe who make a living sifting through other people’s rubbish and resell some of the things they find. I buy empty mayonnaise jars for my herbs and spices from a guy who sits by the side of the river with a collection of ‘reclaimed’ containers in all shapes and sizes.

As for the rest, the non-reclaimable stuff, every house has its own waste disposal unit. This unit consists of: a pile. That’s right: every house has its very own pile of its very own garbage sitting in its very own back garden. How charming. This obviously started out as good idea in the time when most of people’s waste consisted only of organic stuff. Unfortunately this is no longer the case. Sometimes the pile starts out as a pit, but after a number of years, this will have grown into a mound. The stuff just doesn’t go away, does it? I too have such a mound in the back of my garden. In fact I inherited Alfred’s! Aren’t I the lucky one?! The answer, quite surprisingly, is: yes. Apparently my pile makes very strong fertiliser. Even peppered with all kinds of non-degradable junk, I am told it is perfect compost for my garden. So here am I, staring despondently at years of empty toothpaste tubes, pens, sandwich bags, broken flip-flops and an assortment of unidentified pieces of heavy iron sticking out of what I hope will become my vegetable garden, while Mayeso cheerfully exclaims: “This is very good topsoil!”. Yeah, well, let us first see what the tomatoes taste like, that’s what I say.

But one good thing has already come from all this. I have finally started separating my household rubbish. I have divided my pile into two sections. Kitchen and garden waste on the right, the rest on the left. (Right is buried, left burned.)