I was walking up the street toward my house when I saw a young man coming from the other direction casually toss a bit of paper trash into my driveway. As we passed I asked him: “Por que boto su basura en mi lote?” He smiled like he didn’t understand.
So I grabbed him in a headlock and dragged him back to my driveway and made him pick it up. Well, not really. Only in my head do I take such rash actions. But sometimes it seems like we are at war with those who refuse to take responsibility for disposing of their own trash. It is of course a worldwide problem; But as my world is Costa Rica the battlefield is local.
Not all is bad– over the years I have seen more of an evolving consciousness when it comes to garbage. My first month here, I rode on a bus to Tamarindo and was surprised to see numerous passengers seated ahead of me casually tossing their garbage– cans, plastic bottles, plastic bags full of smaller plastic garbage– out the windows of the bus.
One of my favorite urban legends of the time that circulated among gringos, was of a bus with a notice posted inside that advised the passengers to maintain the bus clean by throwing their garbage outside. There was never proof that such a message existed, but the rumor likely gained traction from repeated observation of the puercos sin cultura who seemed to be on every public bus.
My barrio does a good job of maintaining clean streets. The nearby soccer field has several containers for trash and they fill up each week. Something I have noticed is that the trash that goes uncollected is usually the tiniest trash– plastic bottle caps, cigarette butts, tiny wrappers like the one the guy threw in my driveway, and small paper labels and flyers.
Local cable and cell phone companies have the annoying practice of going house to house and leaving plastic embossed advertising flyers wherever. In the case of my house, they are placed between the bars of the driveway gate, where they invariably fall to the ground and become trash. It reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg line: “Isn’t a person passing out flyers on the street really just saying ‘Here, you throw this away’.
When I unscrewed the lid from the plastic bottle of water I bought for the gym there was a weird plastic nipple that I didn’t want or need. I suppose it is there to prevent spillage, but I pried it out and threw it in the garbage. But imagine how many of these plastic nipples are removed and tossed and added to the universal plastic garbage pile, which totals in the millions of tons annually. (And for the record, I am still using that same plastic bottle months later).
Sometimes I curse the name of John Wesley Hyatt, who took existing 19th century technology and introduced celluloid, which opened the door to the plastic dominated world in which we live. From microplastics in our bloodstreams to the great Pacific Garbage Patch, we can not escape it. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.
Maybe somewhere there is an inventor working on a use for all of this discarded plastic– a fuel source, or building material or anything that simultaneously cleans up the environment and provides a useful byproduct. Until then, the war against excessive trash, plastic and otherwise, will have to be waged locally – from the barrio where I live to the soccer pitch around the corner.
