Trash Talk

There’s a scene in Mad Men where Don and Betty are so close to ripping the damn Bandaid off their marriage, but are instead pretending to be happy at a picnic with the kids.  As they leave their brief contented scene, they simply lift their blanket to let the picnic trash float away into the park.  Because by this point in the series it’s impossible to be shocked by the boozing and overt misogyny, I was shocked by this act of blatant littering.  Though my mom assures me that people did not have such regard for littering in the 1960s, and in retrospect I assume this scene is more metaphor than historical marker of American behavior, trash and how we relate to it is weirdly cultural and definitely invokes our social and political systems.  In other words, even trash talk can be anthropological.  

Perhaps the most striking symbol of Ghana's trash problem-a place where two tiny bins are supposed to exist but do not in fact exist. This fake garbage receptacle just so happens to exist in front of Flagstaff House which is the presidential palace. 

In Ghana littering is a norm.  Places to deposit trash in public settings, like garbage cans, are virtually non-existent in the country because a haul away trash system is non-existent save for well to do residential parts of the major cities. Instead, the system of waste management is to toss the trash when and where you need to in anticipation that someone else will sweep it up and burn it.  This works decently well, especially in areas where the only waste management company, called Zoomlion, operates. You still see a lot of trash, but not the amount there would be without any kind of management.  

In my early stages of existence in this country I would diligently hold onto all of my trash until I found a rare trash can to deposit the trash. On public transit I’ve had seat mates rip the trash out of my hands and toss it out the window on my behalf, practically rolling their eyes at my ineptitude as they do so. I simply was not capable of throwing trash helter skelter.  As long as I put the trash where I thought it was my responsibility to deposit it, I had peace of mind even though I knew that the trash I deposited in a bin could very well be emptied in the very helter-skelter way I was trying to avoid. 

This cartoon by the Ghanaian Black Narrator, demonstrates that garbage is a concern on the socio-political landscape. 

As my time here extended,  I’ve found myself able to take on this behavioral norm, especially in moments where something about the country angers or frustrates me.  In such instances, I vengefully throw my trash on the ground.  I turn into a petulant woman seeking solace in a perfectly contextually appropriate act that is only anti-ethical to my own social rearing. 

However, now that I’m not a nomad in the country but a permanent settler in a small community that does not have Zoomlion service, I am again having trash anxiety.  I produce more trash than the average community member because I rely on buying purified drinking water contained in plastic bags and also purchase more packaged food items. Instead of getting into the daily Ghanaian habit of piling my trash outside and burning it, I fell into the daily American habit of compiling my trash inside.  Now every 3 weeks or so I embarrassingly carry my bag outside and try to burn it with the help of very eager kids.  But because it is so much trash (and mostly empty plastic bags that still contain remnants of water) the trash is hard to burn and instead becomes a heap that is 25% burned and that beckons kids to excitedly dig through looking for the bizarre things like sunscreen bottles.  Though I guess I’m creating a trash midden that could potentially challenge some future archaeologists, I feel a lot of guilt for creating and not managing waste that is left visible to my eye and not hauled away to some landfill or recycling plant. 

While I feel shame with my obvious contributions to creating visible trash, disposability is perceived differently here.  Disposability is about being “more hygienic” and being socially mobile.  When I first came to Ghana in 2002 plastic bottles were rare. Now plastic bottles are becoming a norm even though the drinks sold in them are more expensive than the same drink sold in the reusable glass bottle. So as this country becomes hungrier for items that can be used and tossed in the name of social mobility (and in a move reminiscent of Don and Betty Draper’s picnic clean up),  it relies on the lower classes, those Zoomlion workers to wade through, sweep and burn that disposability.  Those lower classes also become informal recycling centers, sifting through trash to find reusable items.  

This can be on the benign level of a kid picking up a plastic Coke bottle to give to their mom who will wash it and use it to sell homemade beverages. But it can also take on a more disturbing (and potentially malignancy inducing) form.  In Accra there is an area known as Agbogbloshie  that collects the world’s e-waste at the Ghanaian government’s approval. Here, Ghanaians eager for some kind of livelihood, dig through antiquated and not so antiquated Western technology coming from Western countries to pick off valuable metal scraps that can be re-sold.  Needless to say, this is an atrociously toxic condition under which to  make a living. 

Here gas is being funneled into old plastic drink bottles.  Most "gas stations" in the Upper West are simply bottles of fuel on a table by the roadside. 

While Ghana struggles to manage trash coming from daily consumer goods, and deals with the e-waste of other countries, it excels at managing and reusing larger consumer durables that are given a chance at re-birth before being sent to a dump.  In Kumasi there is a place called Suame Magazine where old, supposedly dead cars are re-born as new vehicles. Electronic goods are treated similarly. Before my departure to Ghana I had a hell of a time trying to find a place in St. Louis that would repair a broken netbook screen for less than the cost of the netbook.  In Ghana, getting your laptop, or any other electronic good fixed is not only possible, but usually easy and affordable.  So just as I hope that someday soon there is a more formal and consistent form of recycling all of the disposable plastics that are increasingly used in this country, I hope that one day, the US will return to a system in which our stuff can be fixed and not just tossed out for the world's poor people to pilfer through because a new one is cheaper anyway.  And on a personal side, I'm going to buck up and start boiling my drinking water so that I can avoid buying the plastic bags and partake in the first rule of waste management: reducing. Hopefully this will also reduce my trash anxiety. 

A library of old laptops used for their parts