Waste Not, Want Not

Little things about this country amaze me every day.  I think we, as Americans,  can all honestly admit that we "waste" a lot.  Whether we're throwing away the leftovers in the fridge that we had every intention of eating (several weeks ago) or cleaning up after a birthday and throwing away the 12 million* pieces of plastic that are used to wrap and contain every individual piece of every toy we purchase, we throw a lot of stuff away.  Living in Texas where recycling appears to be frowned upon, this was a bit distressing to me.  We had to physically bag all of our recyclables and sneak them on post since off post residents are not supposed to dispose of items on post.  We could also take them to the dump ourselves, but our community - perhaps the last in the nation - did not offer a recycling program with our garbage pickup.  Then, we moved to California where our recycling bin was probably twice the size of our trash container.  And we filled it.  Every week.  While the state of California has significant budget issues, and recycling programs are expensive, I really think they've probably got the right idea.  It might cost something to recycle items, but isn't it better to reuse something at a small fee than create something new and use up resources?  You tell me...

Anyway, then we come to Bangladesh.  There is no recycling program here.  There's also not really any sort of organized trash system here.  We have a small can outside our house, and sometime during the week, our gate guard lets in someone who picks up all of our trash, then goes through and sorts everything to figure out what could possibly be used again.  This is naturally good and bad all at the same time.  Rather than just throwing everything away, we have to be slightly careful about what goes out with the trash.

Case in point:  Recently we were picking up some fruit and vegetables at a stand.  The man bagged my oranges for me in a recycled bag.  Recycled here of course means something a bit different than it does back home.  It means they took paper from something else, glued it together to create a bag, and are now offering it to you as something to use again.  Sometimes it's newspapers, sometimes other random papers.  On this day, the bag we took home happened to be log sheets from a security firm appearing to list addresses of residences of ambassadors and their key employees.

Not that I feel like we were disposing of any sort of important papers before, but we will now be shredding just about every piece of paper that leaves our house lest I find my grocery lists and letters from home pasted together inside the next bag I pick up.


*Not an exact figure.