Taking out the garbage

“PEOPLE who defile public places are social criminals. Culprits can be fined and arrested.” A loud splash suddenly shook my concentration away from the Mumbai street sign, as a man emptied his rubbish into the Arabian Sea – next to a bathing family, no less.

So where are these garbage police, exactly?

India is a beautiful country filled with astonishing contrasts, deep traditions and culture – and some of the filthiest living conditions known to man. For all of its sophisticated spirituality, mouth-watering food and countless complicated languages, there exists little awareness of basic waste-disposal practices. Plastic bottles litter the streets, grand monuments lay among discarded packaging and paper and – YUCK – I just stepped in some cow dung. At least, I hope it was from a cow.

Recently, when at a train station in Middle of Nowhere, India, I was privy to an unusual method of rubbish disposal. I watched transfixed, as a woman frequently set about sweeping the platform, meticulously transferring all available garbage down onto the tracks.

After a while, a group of men would appear in the distance at the end of the platform, accompanied by a large trailer being pulled alongside them. Three of the men scrambled down, sans gloves, picking up all of the garbage off the rails and transferred it into a large concrete cylinder located between the tracks. Once full, its contents were scooped into a plastic container was then passed up to their co-worker on the platform, who would empty it into the large trailer. This back-breaking process went on for the length of the platform until they finally disappeared, just in time for the woman to commence sweeping again.

Nowadays, the perfectly manicured parks and forests of Finland are a distant memory, along with the practical garbage sheds located next to apartment blocks with their various categories of bin. Let’s not forget gathering pantti from recycling bottles, paying for plastic bags – or even the small cardboard box at the supermarket into which one can deposit used batteries. 5.5 million Finns seem to have the right idea. Just how to inform the actions of almost 1.2 billion people down here, I don’t know.

James O’Sullivan is an Australian who along with his Finnish wife Anna has turned the inevitable pipe renovations presently ravaging their Helsinki apartment block into an opportunity to spend nine months abroad. More postcards in future issues.

JAMES O’SULLIVAN - HT
ANNA O’SULLIVAN