Scribbles

While I love living in Italy, one of the things that intrigued and bothered me is the lax attitude versus waste management, recycling and garbage collection.

Sure enough, there are many “parts” in Italy, each with their own habits, procedures, administration, and culture, so I can not speak for the parts I have not lived in, or travelled through, but it seems in many parts the garbage collection is done in the same way: People dump their waste in garbage skips scattered along the streets, both in town centers and along the roads in rural areas. A garbage truck comes along every so often to empty the skips.

There seems to be no limit as to what people can dump in these skips. You can find anything from normal household garbage, the contents of entire file cabinets, chemicals like paint, engine oil and cleaning products, leaves and branches from the garden, bicycles, fridges, microwaves and computer screens. Just about anything goes. And if it is too big to put inside, people just leave it next to the skip.

Often these collection points, separated by only a few hundred meters in the towns, become a concentric area of scattered broken glass, plastic bags, tins and cans that were either spilled while throwing them in the skip, pulled out by street dogs, or just dumped on the spot, next to the skip.

There are mainly three types of skips: one for generic waste, one for paper and cardboard and one for plastic and glass. In many cases, though, you can only find the one for generic waste, so “recycling” is often only a remote thought in Italy. A thought confirmed if you look what people actually dump in the recycling bins. It seems like they are used as an overflow for the general waste skip.

Most of the time, the skips are not emptied fast enough. What is the “well-intended waste generator” to do? He or she put his stinking and leaking garbage bags in the car (guaranteed to leave a smell for the next two months) early in the morning (what else do you need to start off a nice day), drives to the skip only to find it full… Of course people will not drive to the next one, or come back the next day. They will dump it right there.

I was glad to finally see some recycling bins in my neighbourhood. Previously I had to drive 3 km to the nearest place where I could conscientiously dump carefully separated paper, plastic and glass.
Unhappy I was to find the “glass and plastic”-skip is never emptied. It just stands there, full. And has been for the past four months..

More on The Road about living in Italy.

1. A lot of Crab!
While editing my Dutch eBook, Addicted to the horizon , a lot of memories are coming back. Tine and I were scanning through some old pictures when she reminded me how intriguing some of this stuff was. [there is a lesson here: one gets easily used to the extra-ordinary].
I guess I got used to all of it, having gone over these pictures so many times already. And having been there. Things like the shot above, taken during our expedition to Clipperton, a deserted island in the Pacific. The land crabs were piling up trying to devour the bone of a spare rib. That is a lot of crab! They would eat anything. Plastic, cardboard, sleeping bags, ropes,… This made the island pretty clean!
Human waste was considered a delicacy. While squatting ‘au naturel’ on the island, shorts around our ankles, we had to scuffle forward as dozens of crabs would be fighting for your waste, piled on top of each other. If you were not scuffling fast enough, they would grab hold of your private parts… Tell ya, there are more pleasant things in life.

2. A lot of Crap!
Read an article today about the amount of garbage the world produces.. As an example, every day, the US [not trying to pick on the US, but it was the only figure I found!] produces enough non-recycable waste to fill the New Orleans Superdome twice. That is 230 million tons of solid waste per year. The amount of pollution and toxic leaching produced by a landfill receiving 1,000 tons per day of waste is 22,000 lbs. After a landfill closes, it is estimated that emissions could remain constant for as long as 30 years.

3. Let’s launch “Crabs for Crap”!
I think I will run for prime minister, with only one single programme item: I will introduce the use of Clipperton land crabs in the processing of our waste in ‘developed countries’. Think I stand a chance?