Garbage

The next topic on this blog is kind of messy. It is about garbage. Here is one among the things that struck me most in my first days in India – in fact, I was kind of horrified about it – the immense amount of trash that was lying around everywhere. Shocking, I thought. I have to be honest. If something hits you like the garbage hit me, you can´t help seeing it all over the place – and all the time. In other words, in my first two weeks in India, I saw trash everywhere. Now that I am getting used to it, my eyes are more open, as it were, and I can appreciate the beauty of this country as well. Indeed, I am able to see a range of places without garbage. Still, the huge amount of plastic waste is a big problem for India (as it is for the whole planet). Heaps of trash are piling up in many corners, trash floats on top of the rivers and is blown through the streets.

In the north of Delhi, there is an enormous mountain. Seen from a distance, it can remind one of Ayers Rock in Australia. When you get closer, however, you can see the many raptors wheeling above that mountain. And then you realize that this is not a mountain made of rocks, soil and grass. For soon enough, you detect the entire spectrum of colors used by the food industry for the designs of their wrapping materials.

And then it hits you: this is a huge, an enormous mountain of trash. And of course, when it is sunny and hot—which is quite often the case in this area—you don’t just see that mountain, you smell it, too! In fact, “smell” is way too charitable an expression, “fetid stench” captures things much better.

What shocked me most was the fact that hundreds, if not thousands of people live in their houses, huts, or dwellings at the foot of that mountain, literally right next to it – even on it!  It was almost unbelievable for me, particularly on those days when that huge mountain was burning. I am not sure what caused the fires, whether they has been started on purpose or whether they were the result of some accident. Either way, because of all that plastic piling up there, the smoke was intense. Intensely smoky, intensely stinky and, I am pretty sure, also very poisonous. And yet, as I was passing by on the highway, sitting in the car, I could see people standing in the middle of these smoky billows.

What were they doing there, I wondered? Working? Searching for food? Looking for anything useful? I do not know. But no doubt, it cannot be very healthy to be that close to that burning, smelly, stinky mountain of garbage, let alone to live there. I also know that I want to keep an eye on this topic, for it really is quite disconcerting.

Now a switch of topic from that huge mountain of trash to our private garbage, because the way our private garbage is being dealt with is also quite different from what we are used to from the U.S. or Germany. In Germany and in the U.S., there is an orange or white garbage truck that comes once a week to pick up the garbage that we put out on the curb.

This is not how things work here. Here, we put our black garbage bag in the hallway in front of our apartment door on the second floor. From there, it disappears quietly, at some point in the early morning, and will be dispatched by a big cargo bike (actually, it is more of a tricycle) and be brought to the nearest garbage container. Daily. And that is actually a good thing in this kind of climate. Because of the heat and the humidity, the garbage starts to smell rather fast. So I am really quite happy about that service, and happy that the trash is being picked up right in front of the door, so that I do not have to bring it down, or anywhere to some big smelly container. Every day! That’s great!

Maybe some of you will now suspect  that I am getting quite arrogant here. After all, you might think, instead of having someone do the dirty work for me, why wouldn’t I bring the trash to the container by myself?

This very much was my way of thinking in the beginning as well. But as a good Indian friend of mine explained to me, this is quite misguided, so he broke me out of the habit. Again, in the beginning, I found it quite hard to accept this kind of assistance here and there, especially because it often concerns things that one does not really like to do, stuff that requires one to get one’s hands dirty. But while we were talking about the poor living conditions on the street and the many instances of begging at intersections, my friend said something along the following lines: “If you really want to help, give people in your environment work, accept their offer to help, and pay them. That allows them to earn some money, provides them the possibility to feed their families, more or less, and they have something to do. That counts for a lot.  You can also offer them of your clean water or hand them something else that is needed. Acting like that helps a lot (and probably much more than handing a few rupees to the beggar on the street). You won’t change the Indian system in a trice, but you may actually change the life of these people for the better.” These words gave me pause. I am pretty sure this topic will come up again in this blog. It is a huge and difficult one, and I have to think about it a lot.

Back to our trash situation. A couple of weeks ago, we discovered a wonderful addition to our usual trash pick-up. We found a grass roots business that does recycling, and we are now part of a community called “One Step Greener”. This business was founded by two brothers at the age of eleven and fourteen. The two got angry about the pollution problems around them. And when one of the boys developed an illness that is partly caused by pollution, the recycling idea was born. Once we heard about it, we were hooked right away.

So now we separate plastic bottles, glass, cardboard, paper, and so on, like we used to do in Germany (and like we used to do, to some extent at least, in our former home town in the U.S). And now, the stuff we sort is being picked up twice a month and recycled. It is a little thing to do. Still, given that I grew up with a blue and a green and a grey trash bin, it makes me feel more at home. 😉 So far, this recycling system has only been implemented in five neighborhoods of New Delhi. Compared to the size of the city this is tiny, but it is a start, and it gives hope. I am also hoping for a fast growth. Fingers crossed.

For today I say goodbye with a warmest “Namaste”.