On Waste (18 August 2003)

I come from a line of obsessive-compulsives. I've got the tendency on both sides of the family. On one side is a collection of individuals who are probably some of the most meticulous in the world; if anything burns down, gets broken into, or blows up, it's not going to be their fault. On the other side is a group of people whose preoccupation with germs demands the frequent washing of objects and a proscription against breathing too hard on anything, even birthday candles. But neither side will throw anything away if there is any way of avoiding it. Food is given to dogs, cats, and birds. Cars are driven until they quite literally fall apart. Clothes are neatly put away until they come back into style. Books are kept, generally forever. Anything with print on it is saved — whether neatly, in scrapbooks, out of sight in filing cabinets, or (as is far more likely) on beds, on table tops, on the floor when all else fails. My family has a great fear of wasting anything.

Now I know this makes us somewhat unusual for the Bahamas, where "new tings" are always better than old ones, and where cars and homes and objects are often got rid of when something fresher comes along. Most of us, it seems, believe that newness is next to Godliness, and will go to great lengths to be in style. What happens to the outmoded is not our problem; if we think they can move it, we will put it out by the roadside for the garbage men to collect, and if not, we will tow it away ourselves and throw it in the bush. So imagine my joyful surprise when I moved to British Columbia, Canada, to find myself in a country that had made laws about waste that suggested that what I'd been raised to do was not as weird as it seemed.

In Canada, as in most of Europe, it is now illegal to throw away objects that can be recycled. My husband and I worked at a residential college where everyone was required to sort the trash; the institution could be fined according to the number of recyclables that were collected with the garbage. We had to separate out paper, plastic, cans and bottles, and we were strongly encouraged to compost vegetable matter. Certain objects had to be disposed of in a special manner; batteries, for example, were considered "hazardous waste" and could not be put in the regular garbage, but turned in at specific places. As housefellows — staff attached to a specific residence — we were responsible for seeing that the whole house recycled appropriately. A specific group of students carried away paper, cans and bottles every week, and the whole college composted.

Now from one perspective, this seems to be a lot of work for no good reason. Canada, after all, is a big country. You could, in theory, dump garbage in unoccupied land for centuries and still never have to be bothered by that waste. Yet Canadians have made it illegal to throw away anything that can be recycled for the simple reason that dumped waste matter has detrimental effects on the environment — leaking poisons into the air, affecting the atmosphere, or leaching them into the soil, where they contaminate the land and the groundwater. While the majority of Canadians are unlikely to be immediately affected by those poisons, the country nevertheless has taken a global perspective, and has created laws that change the activities of their citizens, not for the now, but for the future. Here we are, though, on an island that's about 120 square miles in area and we Bahamians throw away everything away.

Now there's been a lot of discussion lately on garbage. The government is on a clean-up kick and residents are being strongly urged to beautify their environments. Of special concern are abandoned lots in residential neighbourhoods — our unofficial dumps. The owners of these lots are being urged to clean them up, which is a good thing. But what we are not being told is what to do with the trash that we find on them.

The easy suggestion is that we find some way of moving that trash to the government dump. But I am not so sure that that is going to solve the problem. Because we have no national recycling policy, we carry everything to the dump, from hazardous waste to compost to patently recyclable objects. What happens to that waste, between our tropical downpours, bright sunlight and high temperatures, is a chemist's dissertation. Our bedrock is made of porous limestone, which means that impurities leach through the soil and soak into our water-supply. The freshwater lens that made New Providence inhabitable has no doubt been contaminated, and I am not convinced that the solution to that fact is to continue to deplete the Androsian wells. Canada, with all its land and water, has chosen to educate its citizens about responsible waste disposal. When are we going to do the same?

Before anyone imagines I am being alarmist, let me tell you about my trip to North Eleuthera this March. I visited both Spanish Wells and Harbour Island, two islands that are so small that to drive a car rather than a golf cart seems absurd. Yet on Spanish Wells not only did I see cars, but I noticed that the licence plate numbers are near a thousand, while on Harbour Island there appear to be nearly 500 cars registered. My question is this: when the owners of those cars grow tired of their vehicles, what are they going to do with them? For that matter, where are the owners of the more than 120,000 registered motor vehicles in New Providence going to do with them when they're finished with them? The mind boggles.

I believe that there is something cultural, something historical, that lies at the bottom of Bahamians' habit of waste. It is a marker of wealth to throw away what you no longer need, especially if that thing is still good; and many of us, whose parents and grandparents were raised in poverty, still revel in the knowledge that we have the luxury of getting rid of the old and buying the new. Waste, for us, separates the classes; you recycle when you cannot afford to get something better. What we need to recognize, however, is that this attitude towards wealth is an outdated one, and we need to throw it away with all the other things that have gone out of style. The richest countries in the world have adopted recycling as a way of life; globally it is a marker of poverty to throw things away indiscriminately. It is time we recognized that we are a high-consumption nation, not a poor one, and so we need to adopt the habits of our richer neighbours when it comes to waste disposal, rather than hanging onto the practices of our forefathers.

On a more practical level, it is time we also recognized the entrepreneurial possibilities of recycling. We have a paper producing company, which imports the pulp that it uses. Surely if someone set up a paper recycling plant, they could make and market that pulp from the mounds of paper that we discard annually. Other objects can be sold to recyclers in the USA and elsewhere for cash. It is a matter of exercising the imagination — something at which Bahamians are traditionally very adept. And it is a matter of choosing environmental responsibility over individual laziness.

It is not difficult to train children to be responsible, to think beyond their immediate surroundings and consider the impact of their actions on a wider level. It is far more difficult to impart a sense of responsibility to adults who have never been held accountable for their actions. But it is possible. After just three years of living in Canada, however, my husband and I learned the value of recycling. When we returned home it seemed somehow sacrilegious, evil almost, for us to put recyclables out on the road for Environmental Health to take away. If the two of us could be reprogrammed in just three years of living abroad, how long would it take us all to make recycling a Bahamian way of life?