Trash talk is mind boggling

It boggles the mind. The fact that each Dubai resident was responsible for generating a mammoth 2,190kg of waste in one year. Reading the facts and figures made me feel a righteous sense of indignation until my eyes lit upon my accumulation of material possessions amassed over the years.

To be truthful, I could do without a vast amount of this. Not that I bought this stuff heedlessly, but simply because there's so much of it now that I no longer know what exactly I have. If I were asked to sit down and list all my worldly belongings, I would be at my wit's end.

How and why do we collect so much? I remember my first house move. At that time I had hardly had the time to acquire much so the moving part was easy and accomplished in a day. By the time the second move came round, I was flabbergasted to see the extent of my possessions. Thinking about the gigantic task of having to shift this mountain of goods made me consider reviewing my decision to move house. How could I possibly manage to sort out all this stuff, I asked myself, in time for the big move?

As each suitcase was pulled out and the contents examined, I realised how much of this was what I should have got rid of ages ago. Whatever possessed me to hang on to that pair of pants which I had outgrown long ago? The passage of time had seen the expanding of waste and waist. How had I fooled myself into believing that I would lose enough weight by some miraculous chance and fit into those clothes? I had obviously been deluding myself.

I wonder if there is anybody out there who can truthfully say that they have just the bare minimum required and no extra baggage. I am of course not referring to the emotional kind but the physical which one can weigh. There are the heaps of clothes which spill out of cramped cupboards, necessitating exercising extreme caution when one ventures to open one of these. The trick is to make all your moves very, very slowly and extremely carefully if one doesn't want to risk being buried alive under the avalanche.

Make the cut

Wardrobe stylists advise us on how to make the cut. Simply discard all those items of clothing that one hasn't worn for over a year. Such a simple solution and yet so hard to accomplish. One picks out a skirt or blouse that hasn't seen the light of day for a while. As one contemplates making it the base of the discarded heap, one is struck with what-ifs. What if it comes back into fashion one day? What if I fit into it one day? What if I regret this move when I am told later that one just cannot get hold of this particular label anymore? Thus, the 'piles' disease keeps growing, with no remedy in sight for a hoarder like me.

And just as one questions one's obsession with hoarding there comes along a newspaper article on a Los Angeles man conducting a year-long experiment as his contribution to the study of consumerism. We are told that for the past eight months Dave Chameides has refused to throw away anything, resulting in empty soda bottles, pizza boxes, plastic bags, styrofoam trays and used tea bags lining almost every available inch of space.

Learning about someone who voluntarily keeps trash serves as encouragement to all of us pack rats. We feel this spirit of oneness, of someone championing our cause. We no longer feel we are to be pitied, even after we have managed to pack so much into our homes that we are in danger of being evacuated to safety.

Of course, we shall completely ignore the part about Chameidis saying that he is doing this experiment to raise awareness about the trash we create and collect. Or the fact that in the past eight months he has managed to reduce his waste to a mere 10kg. What we shall do, instead, is trash those who trash our trash.