When I moved to Buenos Aires, I asked the landlords of my first apartment whether I should separate different types of rubbish, and they looked at me like I was some kind of extraterrestrial (this was a look I got quite used to in the first couple of years, as it's part and parcel of being a visiting foreigner). However, it turns out that my conditioning wasn't easy to break; a nagging sense of guilt kept me separating my rubbish into different types, even though they were now going out in the same black plastic garbage bag (for free daily curbside collection). I even bought separate bins to keep things systematic.
And it turns out that there was recycling in Buenos Aires, just not of the city-sponsored kind; an army of foragers called cartoneros that emerged every evening and went through 'dumpsters' before the rubbish trucks come, looking for cardboard, plastic, aluminium, and anything else they could sell to recycling companies. This is how they made their living, and as they became more numerous and more organised, they started asking consumers to separate, and asking the government for help with transport and safety problems.
Now the city provides roadside recycling 'pods' next to normal 'dumpsters', where people can leave their recyclables. I assumed that the city then periodically collects the waste, but I've actually never seen any evidence of collection - it seems to work only as a predefined place where cartoneros can rummage, without having the landfill-bound waste mixed in with the recyclables. The city also has a few 'green points', little kiosks set up in parks where you can take recyclables during defined hours. Keen to bring up my daughters with a similar conscientiousness to what had been indoctrinated into me, I would regularly bring them along when I took the recycling to a punto verde or to the nearest recycling pod, so it would just become a part of their lives. And I would feel all warm inside, because I was being the 'green foreigner', showing the porteños the way forward.
And recycling is good, and everything.
But a few years ago, my wife (a porteña to whom the whole recycling thing had seemed like an obviously good idea) showed me a video, The Story of Stuff, by Annie Leonard, in which Annie talks about what becomes of our rubbish, but also why we have so much of it in the first place. In the video she talks about dangerous chemicals that go into production of all the stuff we consume, the environmental impact of plastics, single-use packaging, etc. It was interesting, but to be honest, at the time I found it a little annoying - mainly because of the implication that we humans shouldn't be dabbling in 'dangerous' things, and industrialists were like naughty boys, who deserved a scolding for doing so. There are lots of dangerous things science discovers which turn out to be pretty useful, once we tame them (electricity is a pretty everyday example). My wife bought and devoured Annie Leonard's book. I didn't read it, ostensibly because she ordered the Spanish edition (for the record, I read Spanish fine, but certainly with more effort than English, and I'm lazy, as shall become clear).
Anyway, when my wife was pregnant with our first daughter, we spent a bit of time hand-wringing about nappies. Disposable nappies are, as we knew, evil, and hang around longer than we ourselves do. However, I had friends who went down the cloth nappy route, had seen the amount of cleaning, bleaching, drying, and general hard work required, and the resulting leakages, nappy rash, etc. That was not for me, and I didn't want my working-mother-to-be wife condemned to that daily grind either. We found out that there were more modern solutions, involving a re-usable part of the nappy with some kind of insert that was either washable, or disposable but made of biodegradable materials. And we spend a lot of time and effort trying to track down where to get some from. They simply weren't available in Argentina. The nearest possibility was in Chile, from where we could have possibly imported a product that didn't look like it would work. Or, from Puerto Rico, we could have ordered a more convincing system, if only they exported them to Argentina (which they didn't) and if we had an import licence (which of course we didn't). Basically, it was near impossible to get what we wanted.
It's supposed to be the case that, in a consumer-based economy, consumers have choice which they can use to create demand that producers will satisfy. That's meant to be the power that consumers have to generate change towards 'green' ways of doing things, if they're so inclined. If consumers make green choices, then producers make green products. Right? Except when it comes to practical nappies, it turns out. I'm afraid the planet lost that battle, and we used evil disposables for both our girls, and this was the beginning of my realisation that, actually, consumers aren't nearly as powerful as we're led to believe.
Fast forward some years. My wife starts sharing Zero Waste videos with me, like those made by Lauren Singer of Trash is for Tossers fame. Again for me, slightly annoying videos. I'm beginning to suspect my annoyance is based on an unjustifiable distaste for a woman with an American accent telling me what to do. I concede that may have to just build a bridge and get over it...
Anyway, separately, the number of videos on Facebook showing whale stomachs full of plastic bags was on the rise. And 'microbeads' were invented and then seemingly immediately discovered screwing up ecosystems in all the world's oceans. And global warming is now obviously really a thing (duh).
And I've been watching Neil de Grasse Tyson's version of "Cosmos" with my oldest daughter, to provide some science indoctrination while she's too young to argue (in lieu of the religious indoctrination she'll miss out on). And they include Carl Sagan's 'Pale Blue Dot' speech from the original series. And it seems obvious to me that, while not altering our ecosystem seems like the 'nice' thing to do, for the sake of whales and dolphins and pandas etc., it's also the most rational thing to do, because we live here too. We eat fish, live in coastal places, need energy, etc. Eating (things that ate) plastic, moving to higher and higher ground, obsessing over energy sources that will run out at the cost of ones that won't, these things just seem obviously bad for us too.
But back to the annoying videos my (clearly more with-it) wife is sending me; she's decided she wants to try out the 'zero waste' thing. She's sick of throwing out plastic bags every day (and I'm beginning to see her point, what with the whale stomachs and everything), and wants exercise our puny consumer muscles by getting things with less terrible packaging.
So I reluctantly go along. I'm not reluctant because I don't agree. The more I think about it, they way we all live is clearly pretty stupid, in fact I'm starting to remind myself of the Man who Realizes He's Beginning to Stand for Something. I'm reluctant because I'm lazy, disorganised, and ignorant. So far I've been feeling pretty good about the recycling-foreigner thing, but now I have stop laurel-resting and bother to learn new things and live differently, and the thought of it makes me feel whiny.
Fortunately for us, my wife is none of these things, and is soon sending me links to recipes for deodorant, suppliers of toothpaste that comes in a metal tube instead of plastic, composting methodologies, etc. She starts defiantly going to the green-grocer with containers and bags, and unashamedly insisting they put stuff in them instead of in plastic bags.
She has also has our local cheese shop and cake shop whipped into shape, and they can now also tell when she's sent her husband out for supplies (it might be the pile of tupperware I'm carrying that's the giveaway). They whisper to each other behind the counter when our number is up. But they politely humour our disdain for plastic.
She is more reticent in cafes and privately bemoans sometimes getting coffee in take-away cups (which are pretty bad form, actually, for a Buenos Aires cafe, but a number of cafe chains now do it so they can seem more hip and American). Fortunately at cafes I'm in my element, and so it's my turn to brazenly ask for things in glass or china.
In the middle of this, we make a trip back to New Zealand, where I expect my wife to revel in our ostensibly clean, green paradise, and pick people's brains about composting and recycling. And sure enough she rapidly catches on to the local community garden where she can take the girls to dig out veges, etc. Being apartment denizens at home, the whole 'gardening' thing is a bit of an 'adventure abroad' for the girls.
But also we were both surprised to see how take-out-cup-and-plastic-packaging-ish the cafes and supermarkets we frequented were - much more than Buenos Aires. It seems that the idea that certain things are recyclable makes people feel relaxed about the sheer quantity of packaging they are doling out.
When we get back to Buenos Aires, we discover that part of the city government's 'zero waste' plan is about to come into effect - a ban on single-use plastic bags in supermarkets.
Wait! What? Buenos Aires has a zero waste plan? Who knew?!
For a long time supermarkets have already been charging for plastic bags. But now they'll be banned altogether, and we won't be freaks any more because we take our own bags to the supermarket; everyone will have to do it. Fancy Argentina being ahead of 'Clean Green 100% Pure' New Zealand. Who woulda thought...
(Actually, Argentina beat NZ in legalising gay marriage too. And never ditched free tertiary education like NZ did in the 90's. More and more ways I can feel unexpectedly smug about my adopted home over my birthplace.)
So anyway. I think I mentioned being lazy and ignorant. I decided to sort out the ignorance part. Where to start? Fortunately, the miracle that is the internet. And my wife. Remember the Annie Leonard video? I watched it through a different lens. It's actually still annoying, but I bought the book anyway (yes, my wife already has the book, but it's still the Spanish edition and I'm still lazy). As it was in English, and as I bought the electronic version so I could feel like I'm living in the future by reading it on a tablet, I read it.
Actually, a lot of what The Story of Stuff does is put numbers on things to make appreciating magnitudes easy. And collecting together and organising things that you already know, or could figure out if you thought about it. But gathering it all together makes you think about the whole system, and see how awful and stupid it is. Frankly I'm not a hugely into "stuff" myself, and not overly inclined to buy the latest trainers or upsize my TV every year. But it's clear from reading the book that it doesn't matter much what I do anyway, as this is terrible on a scale that individual consumers (or even consumers as a group) have little power to influence. These things have to be fixed by government, not the market, because the market doesn't take into account longer term priorities the way it's a government's job to.
And there's a few things in there to make you feel angry and righteous. Particularly things that businesses in 'developed' nations to do people in 'developing' nations.
I think reading Leonard's book was a "red-pill" moment. In retrospect, it probably was for my far-smarter-than-me wife, years ago. But I'm an idiot and didn't pay attention and it took me longer to get with the program.
What does it matter though, right?
The power of one consumer is too puny to affect the market. The power of one voter is too insignificant to change the priorities of government (and I'm not even eligible to vote!). As Cory Doctorow succinctly put it in a recent talk (about something totally different), I'm not going to recycle my way out of global warming.
Well, no.
But I can choose to not be one of those who made things worse; when sea levels rise, we'll all be looking for high ground; maybe moral high ground will count?
And I can learn some stuff that might come in handy after the Trumpocalpse - harvest the power of the sun, grow food, make the products I use...
It's also a pretty interesting experiment, actually. Leonard's book, and the plethora of posts and articles and interviews about pollution, dependence on oil, global warming, globalisation, mass extinction, etc. make pretty grim reading and listening. Are we really that bad? Is it really too hard to escape the cycle of consumption and pollution? Wasn't it only a generation or so ago that people made do with what they had. My mother used to make her own clothes. Hell, I used to make my own clothes.
What would it really take to back up a bit, relearn some skills, think a bit more about the consequences of consumption? There are those that argue that not only is it better for our planetary ecosystem, but it's also cheaper. Is it really cheaper? Or is this something that's only accessible if you already have a level of privilege where you have the option of buying an organic chicken or popping down occasionally to the hippest 'farmers market' while the nanny takes the brats to the playground?
I live in an apartment in a city with few if any farmers markets. There's no quarter-acre block or even small backyard for 'returning to the earth' in any way. I live in Latin America, where getting a book from Amazon can be a challenge, let alone buying the latest crowdfunded gizmo for turning food waste into compost in 24 hours.
How hard can it be? Let's find out...
