Taking out the trash

Garbage post

‘Are you a bulk waste generator?’

This was the question posed to me in utter seriousness by the Bangalore municipality’s property tax portal recently. It sent me down a rabbit hole, and I ended up spending the better part of an anguishing afternoon (for bureaucratic reasons) thinking about garbage and waste.

The portal and the questions in it are definitely worthy of a separate post, but credit where it’s due – it made me think about garbage.

Like nearly every human on the planet, I hate dealing with it.

Photo by Dustan Woodhouse

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At my home, garbage lives in that unpleasant, dank, and dark zone beneath the sink, hidden away in its own little hell. When having to deal with it, every muscle in my body clenches as I open the bin, holding my breath against the impending nasal violation. Like a surgeon squeamish about gore, I delicately maneuver the nasty bulging bags full of squishy wet things out of the bin, and I pray to the garbage bag gods that those mockingly thin bags don’t break. Or leak, smearing unspeakable liquids of unflattering colors and smells on me.

Then, bags in hand, I have to now hope that my flip flops are lying out (benefit of past indiscipline) rather than having been carefully stowed away inside the cabinet (with doors) in which they are supposed to live. Occasionally, I am penalized for my past discipline, and I now have to maneuver the cabinet doors while balancing the ticking garbage bombs.

Men have gotten away with a lot in this world (many of which need righting), but one thing they’ve failed at miserably is showing up at the convention where the household trash disposal decree was passed. The marriage-industrial complex has determined that garbage is best handled by someone with XY chromosomes. And so, it is one of those activities, like dealing with unfortunate stray bugs, that is implicitly assigned to me.

However, this assignment reminds me with depressing regularity of the sheer amount of garbage we generate. Even as a consumer-light couple, we seem to generate trash at an astonishing rate. The food delivery packaging, e-commerce boxes, the varying levels of wet waste, peels and seeds, used coffee grounds, bottles and cartons, and the sheer tsunami of plastic that Thai businesses seem hell-bent on using all add up very quickly. It’s a double blow, really. Not only is the clearing physically unpleasant, but it shames me every time to think this is what we’re putting out into the world.

And then the garbage bags leave the house, and I stop thinking about it.

It’s now out in the world, piling up, day after day, month after month. I suspect every household performs the same ‘forgetting’ every time garbage is taken out. The filthy outcome of crass consumerism is banished by the simple act of not looking.

We often look at the past as a pleasantly perfumed nostalgia garden, but it does occasionally stink. Garbage is the past in its most physically putrid form. It’s the sin of consumption, rotting in a dark corner, waiting to catch up with us every so often.

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Some of the most dangerous two-wheeler driving I’ve ever done in my life has been trying to get out of the stink zone behind a large garbage lorry. Its stench is so powerful that I’ve worried if it was actively re-arranging my cells as I inhale it. The lorry leaks, seeping out unpleasant ooze from all the rotting organic matter it carries. Holding my breath, I’d risk life and limb to overtake, just so I could breathe again. A fleeting moment of thought for the men and women who work around it all day long. Then I’m free, breathing in the toxic vehicular pollutants as if they were pristine Himalayan air.

One should arguably be thinking more about waste in India since it’s staring us in the face regularly. Overnight trash monuments often get erected on street corners. Empty plots are fair game. It spills into runoff ditches and overflows from an occasionally well-intentioned bin. But the reverse happens. You filter it out and pretend like it doesn’t exist because it’s too much. As long as it’s out of the house.

A few years back, I was quite amused that my nephew’s birthday cake was themed around a garbage truck. He was in his garbage-truck-loving phase. I initially dismissed it as an acceptable strangeness of his being an Australian citizen. After all, it’s a country where summers are cold, and its national animal carries a….purse.

But then I tried to look at it through his child’s eyes.

The garbage truck (at least the versions in many countries) is a strange and wondrous vehicle. It’s massive, green, and oddly shaped compared to a car or a bus. It arrives on schedule every day, a hissing transformer that moves its pneumatic arms to eat up all the garbage you put out. Unless you live in a society that has told you garbage is ugly or that people who deal with it aren’t as worthy as people who do other things, the truck is naturally interesting. Like a fire engine. Like a train.

I do wonder if our refusal to look at literal garbage carries over to the garbage in our minds. Throwaway thoughts, self-talk, personality scars, and beliefs that were shiny once but are now rotting away in the dank recesses of a mind bin we never open. A wondrous green transformer that eats away stale brain garbage would be quite useful.

I am not as regular about opening that bin as I am with the one under my sink. It’s full again.

Could be Worse,

Tyag