A clean city, a healthy you

 On the highway, litter congregates most around bus stops and laybyes, and all the way from Ruwa where the long winter grass has been cut to prepare for the new roadworks, rubbish is exposed – cans, plastic, styrofoam containers – the legacy of fast food and carelessness about consequences. I find it horrible. Coming in from the East, Jaggers roundabout marks the trashy ‘Welco-me to Harare.”
Msasa companies make efforts outside their own premises but the clean up needs to be constant, and the islands in the middle of the road and every piece of even semi vacant ground looks like the aftermath of a flood with plastic and toilet paper washed up in the tree roots. I constantly see trash being tossed heedlessly out of windows of commuter buses, often endangering following traffic, as well as contributing to environmental clogging. Even in the city people clean out their commuter buses by tossing empty plastic drinks bottles into the main street. What do people think happens to their rubbish?
Increasingly research shows that the legacy we are leaving for future generations is rubbish! Most packaging takes decades if not centuries to disappear. Disposable diapers so essential to the modern mum with money – and which I have seen dumped next to my neighbourhood stream – take up to 500 years to decompose. A tin can takes 50 years as does all that polystyrene – so called clean packaging that wraps our food so easily from the fast food joint.
And does it decompose? Not really – it just gets broken down into smaller and smaller particles. That is if it’s in the sun. Tucked away in a shady, dry place – styrofoam can last forever.
It worries me. And I don’t know why the proliferation of rubbish is not more of a public concern. We sweep it out of our houses but we don’t seem to care if it clogs our streams, pollutes our air, poisons our space. I don’t understand why a piece of meat needs to be vacuum packed in polystyrene and then shrink wrapped. And I still have the option when I get to the counter to purchase more plastic (200 to 1000 years to decompose) to carry it home!
Colleagues at the Greenhouse Project – an environmental project in downtown Johannesburg committed to nutritious, clean food and a cleaner city, and which provides practical solutions for inner city recycling and reclamation – always take their own containers with them to buy takeaways. I have experienced similar in India where metal containers for food are often the norm. But there the railway tracks are literally lined with broken plastic, a heritage of years of discarded plastic drinks containers. Rubbish already rules and movements towards reusable containers of glass or copper for water may well be too little too late. There is a chance to learn from this but we seem determined to drown in our own garbage and continue to toss it out the window in the expectation that someone will pick it up and take it away. To where? Our space is finite.
Harare is built on its own catchment area. In the rainy season that rubbish left on our streets gets washed down the storm drains – those that are not yet already clogged – and into our water system. We poison ourselves by failing to deal with our rubbish.
We need to take care of our own space – and that space is bigger than our own small yards.  Food for thought? Back to edible food next week!
– g.jeke@yahoo.com