What if you had to live with all the trash you ever created?

Most of the streets in Lusaka are paved. The main arteries of the capitol are nicely paved with asphalt. The rocky, pot-holed, dirt roads in the compounds are paved with plastic bags.

This street in a compound in Lusaka is lined with trash. Plastic bags "pave" the dirt street.

This makes me begin to wonder: What if you had to live with all the trash you ever created? What if there was no garbage collection service to remove, hide away, bury all our waste? What if every water bottle, every Styrofoam take-a-way box, every milk jug, every cereal box we ever bought, we had to somehow dispose of in our own house or yard? How would your home look different? How would your buying choices change?

When I first think about this, images come to mind from Shel Silverstien’s classic children’s poem, “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out!” The poem describes a little girl who happily does her other chores, but hates taking out the garbage, so never does. And it piles up to the ceilings, then it “raised the roof, it broke the wall”… until finally the poem ends:

At last the garbage reached so high
That it finally touched the sky.
And all the neighbors moved away,
And none of her friends would come to play.
And finally Sarah Cynthia Stout said,
"OK, I'll take the garbage out!"
But then, of course, it was too late. . .
The garbage reached across the state,
From New York to the Golden Gate.
And there, in the garbage she did hate,
Poor Sarah met an awful fate,
That I cannot now relate
Because the hour is much too late.
But children, remember Sarah Stout
And always take the garbage out!

--Shel Silverstein, 1974


What a disturbing image! Silverstein again succeeds in frightening adults and kids alike into doing their chores, with wry wit and crafty images of the everyday becoming the very monster that leads to our demise.

I’ve also always hated taking out the trash. It’s so stinky and nasty, but it was my chore as a kid—to empty all the garbage in the house (I never decided what’s worse, the kitchen or the bathroom…) and on Tuesday to drag the cans to the corner for the weekly trash pick-up. And our family of four always had at least 2 big cans full, sometimes an extra bag or two on the side.

Have you ever been to the dump? A couple of times, when I missed a Tuesday (or two!) my dad would make me load all the garbage into the back of his pick-up truck, drive me and all the trash to the dump, and then watch me unload it all. Perhaps he also feared the mountain of garbage akin to Sarah Cynthia’s that could pile up in an extra week—and if it wasn’t in the can, then stray animals were bound to come during the week and spread it all over the yard. The trip to the dump was a lesson that didn’t need repeating. The dump was so disgusting. You could smell it from afar, before you could even see the piles of cans, plastic bags, squishy rotting vegetables, and baby diapers. Flies buzzed everywhere. I have a very quick gag-reflex, but I over-exaggerated to make my dad feel guilty for putting me through this.

But if I had to live with all my garbage, I would be lucky to have Sarah Cynthia’s garbage. For hers was mostly “Coffee grounds, potato peelings,/ Brown bananas, rotten peas,/ Chunks of sour cottage cheese.” And most of these things are compostable: in one’s own backyard they can be transformed from garbage into fertilizer for the soil. In fact, when I lived in Oakland in a community house with 6 adults making garbage and trash, when we composted our kitchen scraps and yard clippings, and recycled our recyclables, we barely had one bag-full of remaining trash to be collected each week.

Unfortunately, if Silverstein were writing today, he would have to rhyme something more like “Wal-mart shopping bags and eternal milk jugs/ little lid-less yogurt tubs and used spark plugs/water bottles, Gameboys and broken ear-buds.” Though less distusting sounding, these waste items carry more disturbing long-term consequences. I like the Britta water filter commercial which shows a driver drinking water in her car, and zooms in on the bottle, saying “45 minutes in traffic, forever in a landfill.” I really value this commercial, because it helps us visualize the consequences of that water bottle. We need help visualizing it, because it is so easy for us not to. Our waste is taken away, out of sight, and therefore out of mind. No longer our problem.

But where does it all go?

• It goes to landfills near poor and/or minority communities, creating environmental injustice. This article claims that it is the other way around: properties near landfill attract poor and minority residents because of lowered property value. Either way, the impoverished black communities in Georgia and Alabama are getting dumped on. Here is a longer article about a study on “Race, Wealth & Solid Waste in NC.”

• It goes to other countries, usually impoverished countries. Read here about the U.S.’s exporting of electronic waste, which is especially toxic. Europe’s garbage is illegally smuggled to avoid tougher waste restrictions and penalties (most goes to places like China, Indonesia, India and Africa).

• It goes to the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” the floating toxic plastic garbage island twice the size of Texas in the middle of the Pacific ocean! Read here about what Scripps Oceanography and Britta are doing to clean it up. And here for other research & action by the organization 5 Gyres.

Here in Zambia, it is often very obvious that all trash has to be dealt with and lived with. There is no trash collection in most of the country. Most people pile their trash in an open pit on their property, and eventually burn it when it gets full. The acrid, toxic smoke is released into the air for everyone to breathe, and to heat up the atmosphere. Trash piles up along the road, in ditches, next to wildflowers. We even saw what looked like a landfill here in Lusaka yesterday, only to learn it is an old cemetery.

Part of what used to be a cemetery.

When you picture Africa, do you picture a fiery sunset with one lone thorn-tree presiding over the savannah? Just add a pile of trash and there you have the stark reality, the beauty and tragedy of the Zambian landscape. We have been conducting a training this week in Lusaka in a compound called Garden. It is so named because it once was a marshy area with lots of gardens, full of sugarcane and other plants. Now it is a typical shanty-town. The streets are literally lined with plastic bags and bottles and littered with garbage, some which will break down, like peanut shells, banana peels and cardboard Chibuku cartons, and some which will remain forever, like water bottles and little plastic whiskey packets. People take great pride in cleaning their homes and sweeping their dirt yards, but the garbage must go somewhere. While American trash is collected and sent across town or across the ocean, Zambians sweep theirs into the street or the gutter.

While there are little or no recycling centers in Zambia, people here have been reusing and recycling for a long time. Scrap metal & wire is collected and made into new gates, burglar bars, doors, even toys. Plastic containers are reused for cooking oil, boiled water, milk, even gasoline and kerosene. Kids are masters of making their own toys (see the Zambian toys created by our young friend Brendan, on his mom’s blog). Plastic bags, maize meal sacks, old wood, and asbestos sheets are used for building everything from fences to walls and roofs, to a small tuck-shop by the road. Almost anything can be fixed or salvaged for parts.

Though the street is paved with litter,
the tuck shop to the right is made of maize meal sacks & other reused materials.

The fact remains that we do have to live with all the trash we create. It has to go somewhere on our planet. I would rather not have to live with it in my house, but I’d rather not dump it on someone else, have to breathe it in the burnt air, swim with it in the ocean, drink or eat it in contaminated fish and water. There are so many creative ways we can reduce, reuse, or recycle our plastic, electronic, and other non-biodegradable waste. As stewards of the earth, and children in God’s family, we should feel obligated to make strides to lessen waste in our homes, churches, cities, and improve our domestic and international policies regulating waste, trade & export, and environmental controls.

We must. We must! If we don’t want to share the dismal fate of Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout, we must. God help us.