The Privilege of Recycling Righteousness

 Waste Hierarchy vs. Litter.  Keep Atlantic Beautiful.

There is a privileged disconnect between weathy nations' obsession with recycling rate of plastic, when the emergency is ocean-bound litter in emerging markets. I don't care if it's recycled, I want to see litter collected before monsoons send it to sea.

Visit WasteAid.org 

Over the past two decades, I've been delighted to see hunger decline globally, disease vaccination rates gain, mass communications tech spread across the poorest nations, and, quite significantly, the income per capita in so-called "third world" nations triple. Most scholars now refer to developing countries as "Emerging Markets" based on double-digit annual per income growth and spending.

Still, they have a ways to go. And environmentally speaking, many African, Asian and South American Communities are at the awkward stage of environmental regulation the USA saw in the 1950s and 1960s, when cars were dumped in American Rivers, and bottle bills were driven by LITTER, not by a heartfelt need to recycle.

There is a reverse normal curve when it comes to recycling and growth of income. Very poor nations recycle the most, because the value of the material is a high wage, they cannot afford to throw it away. In places like Kumasi, Ghana, the metals from cars are segregated into far more categories than an American recycler would ever bother to. 

But when the income of a nation doubles or triples, from very poor to modestly lower class, you start to see disposables being consumed - bottled water in Africa (or plastic bagged) - but not collected. The awkward period when - like my grandparents farm in the 1960s - garbage is being produced by higher and higher levels of packaging, but at best being burned in barrels, and at worst, dumped on roadsides.

And that's what is going on in Emerging Cities, many of which are on the coast, or along one of 7 rivers that dump into the 5 oceans.

Interview with Ghana TV Repair Veteran, and Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt

A Great Gift - The Ability to Interview Elders

Why do some of us become very attached to our grandparents, and others of us secretly dread the holiday base-touch?  Why do some of us spend thousands of dollars per year flying back and forth to visit elderly relatives, and others don't bother to make a ten minute drive, more than once a year?

The gift of boredom.  It's something perhaps lost on the current generation of non-fisher, non-hunter (I'm neither, either), non baseball-watcher generation.  The ever-ready internet is at our fingertips. The cell phone has balmed our boredom so thickly that even minutes lead to fidgets.

Will this reduce book reading?  Great books have made me better than who I am. Could I have finished reading them if I'd had internet in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s?  I appreciate many people who know history and still read books (many far more often than I do). But in wondering at my own weakness for distraction, I fear that great books will not die in fire... but in ice.

Master Baba of Tamale Ghana, retired Tech Sector, on the history of West Africa Television