For some time now I have been thinking about waste and consumption in terms of use of resources, visibility and impact. Studying and teaching about agriculture, technology, development and food has led me down this road. For about a year now I have been creating a course in my head about international development, focused on geographies of waste. More recently, during the process of applying for academic jobs, I have also been designing my next research project as a comparative study of waste inBrazil, India and the United States.
What I am referring to by geographies of wasteare the cultural and spatial differences in terms of the creation, treatment, attitudes towards, and management ofwaste in different places. Is it kept hidden out of sight and buried? Is it gathered together out in the open, sifted through, reused and collected? Is trash seen as opportunity or as something to be quietly disposed of in less affluent areas? What items are labeled as waste, and what are given new life in some other form? One of the key thoughts running through this is the idea of visibility and invisibility of waste and how this reflects upon and influences practices.
Sage has, of course, heard about this interest– she has listened and contributed to my brainstorm sessions, she has brought relevant books and articles to my attention. Now, as we travel, we both look around for signs of trash collection, for people doing the work of collecting waste, for ways that people define what is trash, and for the many different ways things are re-used and disposed of. Even the smallest towns in Laos seemed to have curbside trash bins made out of old tires. In Fiji and in rural Cambodia, people burned old coconut shells for fuel. In Vietnam, there were massive street-side markets filled with used bits and pieces of various things that would have been thrown away long ago in the US. Outside of Hanoi, along amajor highway, we saw a giant dump that appeared to have been burning for years. One of the quintessential smells of traveling in India and South East Asia we refer to as “the sweet smell of burning trash”. Everywhere, everywhere, there are plastic bottles and bags lining the sides of the road.
The first things that visitors to India generally notice are the visibility of poverty and of trash. I have certainly noticed and considered these two things, and how they may connect, at length. Trash, waste, dirtiness, illness, pollution have played major roles in my time in India, and I have found myself considering in particular my impressions of waste in India and in the United States. Waste is kept invisible in the US and is often quite out in the open in India. That is often true for poverty as well. In both rural and urban India I have been struck by the amount of trash one sees, and I have wondered: is there really more waste produced in India – or is it simply not hidden?
As I have watched Indian families, businesses, cities and individuals create and dispose of waste, I realized that the key difference between these two countries is the extent to which we hide our waste in the US: we hide it in our homes in black plastic, in cans with lids, in bags in dumpsters; we try to never see it. Part of this most certainly has to do with what we know about sanitation and disease, but the extent to which we go to never see, smell, or come into contact with our waste goes well beyond the need for cleanliness. Someone hauls off our waste and buries it, and we never have to look at it (unless we are one of the unfortunate people that live near the hiding place).
In India, it became very clear that I created a lot more waste than the Indian family I lived with, than the other students in the dorm where I stayed, than my friends, than just about anyone. All of the paper, in particular, stood out. I used tons of toilet paper, napkins, writing paper – while those around me managed to create little more than organic waste – using almost no paper products. The family I lived with put out a small bucket of food scraps and an even smaller bucket of plastic and other waste every couple of days. One person came to collect the organic waste, and another person came totake away the recyclables/reusable goods.
If I happen to be on my period I had to collect my used tampons, wrap them in newspaper and find a heap of trash on the street to place them in. There was no other place to put them. I could not put them with the household trash (organic, or recyclable?), lest they be discovered and offend someone in the family. I had to hope that the various people and animals that would surely sift through the piles of trash in the street for recyclable/saleable materials or edible things would not find what I had left.
As I prepared to lead the study abroad program in India last year, the issues of waste came up in the planning stages. I would need to instruct and assist our 12 female students on how to get rid of their “unmentionables” over the three months they would be there: by burning them in pits. I explained this to the students during orientation and then again when we arrived as a group. I tried to explain to students that any waste we created would have to be burned – even the plastic. A few weeks into the program, one of the most sensitive of the students helped to burn the trash created by her and some of the other students. She was struck and deeply saddened when she realized – by looking into one of the pits – the kinds of things that were regularly burned: plastic of all types, aluminum foil, all of the wrappers from the cookies and candies they bought at the store down the road. She was crying as she watched the trash go up in pungent flames.
I have used the exercise of measuring use of resources in undergraduate classes, but I want to push this further in a class on waste. To my mind, understanding and shifting attitudes and practices around food consumption and waste presents the potential to make serious change. I think about waste in terms of labor, of dumping, of environment justice, of globalization. Wouldn’t it be so much more powerful and positive to truly see all of these connections - to put as much effort into reducing consumption as we do into hiding our waste?
I'm so happy to finally visit your blog and read some of your beautiful thoughts (as many as I could at 11 at night!). I was reminded of the difficulty I had wrapping my head around the issue of trash when I first lived in Brazil as a volunteer in the sertão, the most rural corner of the NE. I had no idea what to with used tampons and flung them into the fields. Of course somebody, or some goat, would have found them, but at 18 I was too shy and too linguistically challenged to ask somebody what I should do. What an amazing experience you are having. Much love from Texas.
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