If a secret agent sifted through our garbage to get a clue into our lives, he or she would only learn that we eat junk food.
It would be obvious to the spy that our’s is not a health-conscious family after checking out the huge pizza boxes that I keep stuffing into the paper recycle bin, or the hundreds of tiny, plastic containers of soy sauce, chilly sauce and coconut chutney that I drop into the other bin, whenever we crave Chinese takeaway, or Indian ‘veggie’ food.
(After years of tearing apart pizza boxes with my bare hands and jumping on them to squash them and fit them into the paper recycling bin, I found that they cannot be recycled. The porous paper soaks up the pepperoni topping, the cheese and the oil. You cannot separate the food and oil from the paper during the pulping process).
The undercover person will, however, not find a single piece of written evidence as we stopped writing notes by hand many years ago. The only paper garbage he would find are calling cards from massage parlours and home-printed business cards from maids, cleaning companies and pest control firms (“We kill rats, not neighbours”). I also do not discard junk mail from banks and credit card companies anymore as I no longer have a P.O. box number.
I do get a lot of online spam from people trying to sell me a studio overlooking the Gulf waters, or men’s fragrances or the services of a newly-arrived heart surgeon and Ayurveda practitioner, but that is in the realm of a geek and a hacker, not a garbage collector or a social scientist spying on our throwaway things.
We are a normal family and like other families in the UAE, we produce about one kilogram of garbage per person per day. That is supposed to be a world record of some sorts.
We once threw away our sofa after one of our guests disappeared into it and a computer chair that looked like people have been sitting on it for ages, even though it was only a year old. But the garbage collectors refused to take it away and it lay at our building entrance for a week.
Then someone decided to dump his or her table lamps and a horrendous looking living room knick-knack and the whole scene looked like someone had been evicted from home and was living near the garbage dump!
A recent report in the newspapers that municipalities would charge for taking away my garbage, got me thinking on how to hide my garbage. Maybe I should get up early and place it at the doorstep of my building mate.
Maybe, I should drive to the desert in the night and bury our garbage in the sands. But it would be tricky explaining to the patrolling cops if they chanced upon me digging with my trowel that I use for my house plants, that I am not burying a body.
It would not be very civic conscious on my part as Dubai landfills are already dumped with two billion cans, plastic water bottles and glass bottles every year. The municipality is also trying hard to get people to reduce their daily garbage output to 900 grams per day.
Hope it works because earlier attempts to get people to recycle have failed and you can now see the recycling units at petrol stations, unused. Hypermarkets tried charging people for plastic bags and that did not work either as a few fils did not matter for Dubai residents.
Paying for your garbage to be collected may finally make people more socially aware of their surroundings.
Mahmood Saberi is a freelance journalist based in Dubai. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ mahmood_saberi
