:: Farrukh Dhondy

Seven deadly bins to save the planet

Farrukh Dhondy

"The slave messenger Must speak like a free man"

Nigerian proverb (Tr. From the Yoruba by Bachchoo)

June.13 : My mother would visit me in London and live here, looking after the grandchildren, cooking and, on occasion, travelling around Britain with friends, till the yearning for India got to her and then she would agitate to go back "home".

After she left I would find in the kitchen drawers, in the top shelves of the broom cupboards or in those forgotten plastic cases under the stairs, empty wine bottles, washed and rinsed instant coffee or pickle jars with plastic or metal lids, bundles of plastic bags from the supermarkets stuffed into each other in ballooning quantities, balls of string saved from packaging, even neatly folded brown paper-bags. They would take a short time to clear, to throw into the wheely garbage bins — my mother’s hoard.

No use telling her that in England these things were virtually unusable, that even the pretty-looking jars would find no function, and not being things of beauty or utility, they should, following William Morris’s injunction, not be kept in the house.

The habit of throwing nothing away came from my grandmother and probably from her mother before her, and there the line must have ended because I don’t suppose that in my great-great-grandmother’s time there was any form of packaging of consumer goods.

I do remember though that in all the houses I lived in and visited in my childhood there were metallic biscuit-tins with reproduced paintings of the masters, bucolic landscapes, cherubic pink children or elaborate and colourful designs on them which had been preserved as receptacles for collections of anything from toiletries, nuts, dried fruit, rare lentils to boot polishing equipment, nails and hardware and, when they were very bijou, for my aunts’ jewellery.

And, of course, biscuit-tins from Britain or Europe were not the only receptacles that we preserved. There were elaborately shaped perfume bottles which were kept and admired long after their essences had become ether.

I expect that earlier generations did have jute sacks for rice and flour and various daals and there were those huge, purpose-built jars which my grandmother used to use for pickling mangoes and for other preserves — brown and beige china jars, which looked like they came out of the props department for an Ali Baba film.

Anyone who has seen Slumdog Millionaire will have the scene of the garbage mountains and fields imprinted in memory. Indian city dwellers didn’t need the film to forge the imprint. The fields and mountains of garbage with the children scavenging around them weren’t got up by Danny Boyle’s art department. They exist and as we move around Mumbai, say, we see them and smell them everywhere. And the children who scavenge in them for recyclable materials which they bundle and sell, are part of the urban phenomena of development which made the householder and the businesses, lately, careless of what they threw in the garbage. In smaller towns and once upon a time even in the big cities the bottles and cans and anything metallic or plastic or paper would have been collected and sold to the "dubba-batliwalla/walli" who walked the streets with baskets and scales to weigh and buy them and carry them away.

These memories are occasioned by the fact that in the borough in which I live in London, the Council (the Municipality, the local elected government) has passed a law forcing all householders to classify all the refuse or garbage which the Council’s garbage-truck operatives clear once every week from the pavement in front of the house. The Council has supplied each household with seven different bins of differentiable sizes and colours and has posted leaflets with them to indicate what goes in which. The left-over food on plates, bones included, for instance, goes into one bin, transparent bottles of clear glass into another, green glass into a third, plastic packaging into a fourth. Newspapers and other waste paper stuff go into a fifth, electrical goods not including spent bulbs, into a sixth. Even so, garden waste and leftover building materials such as bits of brick, spare tiles, slates and peculiarly, the "waste straw from rabbit hutches" can’t be disposed in this way at all. Those things as well as junk furniture and discarded TV sets have to be carted down at one’s own expense to the dump and thrown into vast metal containers as big as the rooms of a modern Pune flat.

Council enforces this sorting of recyclable materials with powers to fine people £100 for putting the wrong thing in the wrong bin.

The rumble of the grumble from the public grows. No one likes the new regime except bores who have nothing else to do but classify their garbage and rattle on about how it’s (they’re) saving the planet. But then no one likes parking regulations in the cities and we all resent paying the draconian parking fines, but in the end the law prevails. There is the added and tiresome righteous logic to which the Councils resort when making these regulations — the entire operation is necessary to save the environment and besides, if the householders did not do the sorting, the Council would have to hire thousands of people to do it and that would send the Council taxes soaring — to even deeper grumbles.

Despite the global economic downturn, this new recycling industry in the West which melts down the metal, plastic, paper and cans and re-uses them in various ways, demanding subsidies from the government for the green work that they are doing, is a prosperous sector. I saw a documentary item from America in which one pig farm in California has 60 tonnes of waste food from the plates of diners in restaurants delivered to it each day. The swill, sometimes containing empty ketchup bottles, cigarette cartons and discarded scarves and shoes and bits of umbrella, is mechanically and manually weeded to remove the inedible materials and then decanted into furnaces where it is mushed and sterilised at high temperatures, making a brown sludge which is then taken by tanker trucks to feed thousands of pigs.

It’s not a very savoury process and may not save the planet but, for me, even the sight of these pigs who wallow in the swill while eating it alleviates, to an extent, the guilt I have always felt when wasting food or seeing it wasted. Much though I hate hoarding and recycling, I can’t but help feeling that my mother’s instinct must have, subconsciously, had the noblest, globlest origins.