Farrukh Dhondy | It’s exploitation, not compassion: Globalisation II & recycling tips

“In the beginning was the word
And the word was ’OM’!
Several millennia later
Did it evolve into OMICRON
And mutate into
The abbreviation OMG?”
From Pukka Naidu by Bachchoo

In today’s world, globalisation shouldn’t just mean getting Bangladeshi workers to produce ragged jeans at low wages for the Western world. Neither should it mean closing down air-polluting factories in Europe and transferring production to the Third World at an increased polluting volume — and then importing, on fuel-consuming transport, the same goods into Europe.

It should mean the timely export of anti-Covid vaccines to countries and could even mean the suspension of patents for these and other medicines from which multinational Western firms make billions of dollars. It should, but it doesn’t. Global compassion is far behind the global instinct to exploit. Will it ever catch up? Inshallah!

One of the aspects of globalisation, of which I am sure others are aware of and appalled by, has just struck me. I was vaguely aware of this phenomenon and even, some years ago, prompted by friends to write a script about one aspect of it. I allude, gentle reader, to the dumping by what jargonists call the Global North of their debris on the Global South.

The screenplay, as yet unproduced (alas!), is about the coastal workers in Bangladesh, Gujarat and other places, employed to break up rusty ships sent to their ports for the purpose. It’s a hazardous trade and risks accidents and infections from the bacteria that infest the rust.

My recent statistical shock, however, was occasioned by a photograph in a Cambridge University magazine of Alaba International Market in Nigeria portraying a wasteland of garbage, thousands of tonnes of it, mostly electronic waste, discarded TVs and other household goods. The waste comes from Western Europe, the United States and China. The caption accompanying this photograph didn’t say why Alaba accepts this stuff or why this beach of kandam maal is called an International Market.

What the caption did say was that Greenpeace planted a radio transmitter in a discarded TV set in an unnamed UK city’s municipal garbage collection point and traced its transport by container and ship to the Alaba dump. Obviously, money changes hands.

In 2020, the UK exported 688,000 tonnes of plastic packaging waste. It went to the poorer countries which the Global North considers, to adapt a phrase used by Henry Kissinger for Bangladesh, not a basket case but a garbage can-case!

2020 was the first year of the UK Covid-19 lockdown. It’s feasible that because a vast proportion of the population didn’t go out shopping to the markets and had their groceries and all other household and even luxury goods delivered to their doorsteps, the amount of cardboard and plastic packaging increased several-fold.

Things that shoppers used to carry away in their own bags now arrived in oversized cardboard boxes with plastic or foam packing.

Every household in Britain -- and every commercial premises -- pays a council tax to the local municipality which then arranges for the weekly clearance of garbage. On a particular night of the week one “puts the bins out” — in the case of my local council a sort of grey 15-inch cube for waste foodstuff, vegetable skins, etc, a green bin, four feet high and two feet or so square in length and breadth on wheels, for all the plastic, paper, metal cans and containers and bottle and jars — the “recycle” bin; a brown one for garden refuse and a black one with unexplained usages into which I stuff flattened-by-stamping-on cardboard boxes of all sizes, never sure that they will be taken by the bin operatives. The next morning, together with all the neighbours down the street, one wheels the bins back from the street onto one’s forecourt or wherever.

I have never stopped being appalled at the amount of garbage one household can generate each week, and am never sure what or how the contents of the “recycling” bin are dealt with. Of course, in the commercial world, packaging and presentation, however wasteful, are used as flowers use colours to attract bees or candles use flames to attract moths.

Gone (how decisively gone!) are the days when my grandma in Pune would buy eggs from the seller who brought them cushioned in cloth in a wicker basket on her head to our front verandah and to those of the rest of the street and the city. There was no packaging to discard. And so with the vegetables bought in the marketplace or directly from the weighing scales of the passing handcart to the household saucepans of the bargaining buyer.

And my grandfather, to whom the Times of India was delivered each day, would read it and hoard the daily edition in a pile above his wooden wardrobe. When he thought he had a sufficient number, he would sell the pile to the recyclers who would pass with their sacks through the street, taking the paper away for immediate recycling into paper bags or possibly for re-pulping in paper factories. No bottle was spared -- so to speak. They were either reused in the household or sold to the same paper-and-bottle street-walking recyclers.

Were there garbage bins for kitchen waste? I can’t recall. Or was the green vegetable waste fed to passing goats? Er… no, gentle reader -- Pune was not that primitive even in that lost day and age.