I noticed that the picture below has attracted a lot of interest. I can understand; when I saw this mount of bin bags I HAD to take a picture. The view was astonishing. The last time I saw something similar was during the UEFA Cup Final in 2008 between Zenith and Rangers; that was a very special experience, though. And maybe I wouldn’t be writing this post, but on my way back from work I saw the cleaner bringing more bags to the same pole in the same street (right). Thus I knew I had to blog this.
We are well and truly obsessed with waste and pollution today. Sometimes I even think we speak more about garbage than about cleanliness. We speak more about how to reduce waste and dirt, but we talk less about how not to be dirty in the first place. And I cannot help thinking that our waste-reducing efforts somehow get curtailed by our own focus on the negative side of things. We constantly talk about garbage – and we don’t seem to stop producing it.
This is not say that we should stop being concerned about pollution. But by the look at various organisations that are tasked with addressing the problem, we are a bit too concerned about the result (waste) and its impact. There is WasteOnline, relevant departments at the Environmental Agency and Defra, Envirowise, WRAP, WasteWatch, and a Waste section in the Guardian. When you take your car to the scrap yard, you have to obtain a special certificate of depollution, to prove that your vehicle was disposed of in an environmentally friendly way. Then there are also Waste Management and The Green House… There is a lot of research, analysis, white papers, directives, etc… and, while busy writing all these, people may forget to bin their own rubbish. It happens so.
This focus on the downside of “civilisation”, “urbanisation” etc. is one side of the cultural problem. Admittedly, the focus on progress is so often huge that it almost begs some kind of counteragent. But beneath this lies a far more important problem of respect. All litter we drop is the lack of respect to the place we live, be that a flat, a street, or the whole city. And as a result, this is the lack of respect to ourselves. How really should one not care about themselves to surround themselves with dirt and garbage? Respect is inseparable from attention. You cannot be indifferent and respectful at once. And if you cannot respect yourself, then you will not be able to respect others.
First found and entrenched on this micro level of one’s household or community, the lack of respect and attention then translates on to the higher plane. The garbage becomes emotional and ideological. We leave relationships to rot; we leave people behind just like we throw away the garbage; but likewise we swallow all garbage that our relationships, politicians, and militants throw at us. In the end, we lose the sense of value, and everything becomes one huge rubbish bin. Ironically, some people fall in it and get crushed to death – a gruesome, if tragic, metaphor of how one can sink in waste.
What stunned me the most about the picture so many of you downloaded was the fact that this Everest of bin bags was proudly sitting on a Saturday afternoon in one of Manchester’s central streets. York Street isn’t a lane; it actually leads to King Street, one of the oldest and trendiest in this city. I regularly see similar bin bag hills on the corner of the street where I live, also in the city centre. Perhaps, there is nothing to do about it; after all, the bin bags must be taken out to be collected.
I truly think that waste management doesn’t begin or end with us composting, recycling, dusting, binning, etc. All these are mere remedies that don’t address the problems at the heart of it.