There Is No 'Away' to Throw to
The mountains of plastic, glass, paper and rubber garbage stacked along the banks of the Ciliwung river are a national tragedy and scandal. (JG Photo/Safir Makki). Indonesia is still a very innocent society where the carefree consumer will dispose of unwanted packaging freely and thoughtlessly – even in modern Indonesian society.
I never cease to be amazed to see people in a very expensive car throwing plastic containers out of the window. If you do that while driving down the road in Germany – wow, the police would arrest you, and you'd be lucky to get off with a thousand Euro fine.
The 'discard and forget' rationale, I suggest, comes from changes in technology which are not accompanied by changes in behavior. In days of old, when there was no fast food or packaged snacks, you would walk down a village lane eating a sticky rice sweet wrapped in a banana leaf; you would throw the leaf away, into the woods. Within six months that leaf would have decayed and melted back into the natural environment, whereas modern plastic or film packaging will still be laying on the ground forty years from now.
The mountains of plastic, glass, paper and rubber garbage stacked along the banks of the Ciliwung river are a national tragedy and scandal. The fact that in 2013 only a very few Indonesians see this as a tragedy and a scandal reveals the problem.
Even though the inhabitants of Bogor, Cibinong and southern Jakarta know that throwing garbage into the river exacerbates the problem of flooding, by stopping up drains, they still do it. The idea is "I throw it into the river, it goes away!"
But in fact this is clearly not the case. Plastic in particular never 'goes away'. A moment of clear thinking will make it obvious that there is no 'away' to go to. The discarded object simply goes somewhere else.
My first wife used to laugh and make fun of me, referring to my 'bottle collection'. It's true: I had nearly a hundred empty bottles that I had washed, taken the labels from and stacked away. Some I used to store grains, spices and dried fruit. I always thought the glass was both sanitary and attractive.
That was many years ago. Today people not only save glass jars but also plastic pouches – many are often not even plastic, but are made from a wondrous, mysterious film known as BOPP.
Here's what the Internet says about it: "Biaxially-Oriented Polypropylene (BOPP) films have become a popular, high growth film on the world market because of a unique combination of properties such as better shrinkage, stiffness, transparency, seal-ability, twist retention and barrier.
"BOPP film is used in a variety of applications including flexible packaging, pressure sensitive tape printing and lamination, cable wrap and insulation." Isn't technology wonderful!
Problem is, BOPP is nearly immortal and indestructible. It does not biodegrade and will still be polluting the landscape long after you and I and our grandchildren have biodegraded. So don't discard any packaging or other used material – find an application for it, use it somehow.
It's really very fashionable these days to recycle just about everything. Some houses even route human waste into flower beds, for fertilizer, but we won't talk about anything as nasty as that. Get together with your friends and see what you can recycle. Plastic drink bottles would be a great place to start. Can you make a beach mattress from them? Or string them up in a curtain, to diffuse strong sunlight? Think out of the box!
This is actually a career choice for many fresh graduates in Western countries: Waste Management is a prosperous profession. Not only should we be aware of the importance of recycling and proper disposal (some waste can simply not be recycled); we should become missionaries for proper waste material recycling or disposal.
See some kid throw a plastic candy wrapper on the ground? Scream and point in horror! Turn his thoughtless act into theater to shame the evildoer. Or simply give him or her a talking to.
Indonesia wants to become world-class. It will never do so until its parks, roads and rivers are as sparkling clean as those of Germany, Canada or Japan (which used to have horrible pollution and trash problems). Those countries should be our model
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