In India, very often we are indifferent to where our trash goes. A large garbage truck comes and takes tied up plastic garbage bags away. This has always made me cringe. Even though there is a municipal mandate to separate our trash, not a lot of people abide by this. And even if we do, it gets mixed in the garbage trucks anyway. A lot of the recycling waste from the West is shipped to Eastern countries. Here’s a video with proof.
This made me wonder - where does our trash actually go? To the landfills as high as mountains? Is it incinerated?
SEPARATING TRASH
Separating waste is the first step to understanding how your garbage is generated, and how to reduce it. Have you ever seen a trash audit video/photo on Instagram? You can start doing on yourself if you start separating. Here are my categories:
Other Categories
Compost
Cloth (can be upcycled into new items)
Once you start separating, you can find trust-worthy recyclers for each of these categories or send to a recycling facility directly. There are tons, if you do some digging around.
For soft plastics, I am contemplating donating to Aarohana Ecosocial which makes upcycled products out of waste plastic. Click here to know more about Aarohana’s plastic acceptance criteria.
Just the way I know exactly what is going in my compost, I can ensure that recyclable plastic is actually going to a recycling facility. How else is plastic ending up in the ocean?
SINGLE USE IS A MINDSET
Use it once and throw it away’ is a mindset that has been drilled into us.
I’ve heard so many people tell me that they feel ‘plastic is cleaner’ or ‘tissues are just more hygienic than napkins’. This is untrue.
Or rather, it is a mental construct. Using a handkerchief that you can go home and wash serves the same purpose as a tissue. Modern day marketing has made us think otherwise. Convenience is normally the biggest factor people prefer single-use items. Leading by example is the only way I tend to make my point. But with a bit of preparing ahead, low waste living isn’t hard to adopt at all.