Whats behind the dustbin??!!

India is a dirty country. There is garbage out everywhere in open. Why don't we have bins everywhere? why don't we throw our waste in the bins?
I met Abhinav in SIDH, Mussorie and we spent some time together. He was one of those NRI kids who had an urge to travel India, to know what India is, to know why India is the way it is, to look for their roots. Both of us had gone to SIDH with the similar objective. Interacting with him, also gave me an insight into the first world. Abhinav lived in Canada, and at that time was visiting India.
So where do you people throw your waste, I asked him. Bin was the answer. All the wasted produced goes in the Bin. The laws are followed strictly there. There are heavy fines for someone caught littering in open. Also the people there value their clean streets. But is that the end of story? Is throwing your waste in the dustbin the end of the problem? Pawanji asked us these questions. He told us to find what happens to the bin when it is full.
The west is consuming at an alarming rate and this consumption is their symbol of development. But with high consumption comes high waste production, and waste disposal is therefore a huge problem. Throwing the waste in the bin is not the end of the story. Every morning the bin is empty. So where did the waste go from there? Evaporated? Buried? Or recycled?
The first world exports its waste to the third world, mainly to nations in Africa. Ship loads of waste, all kinds of waste (plastic, electronic, chemical, biological and perhaps even nuclear) are shipped off to Africa. We are talking in the magnitude of tens of thousands of tonnes of waste. All that shipped to Africa.
So why would an African nation take all that waste? In exchange of the aid given by west. The western donors give a lot of aid in terms of food,medicines, relief materials and in exchange they serve as their bin. Africa is fast becoming a global bin. All that we throw in our neighbourhood bin, lands up in some African village.
To throw one's waste in the bin is not the end of it. We need to talk about consumption and production of waste. Endless consumption leads to production of huge amounts of waste. The neighborhood bin is not big enough to handle our waste.

What about recycling? Why don't we recycle our waste?
I feel thats another strong myth we all have, that recycling is the end of the problem. In nature there is nothing as recycling. The natural process is called 'Avartansheel' process. Interestingly, I have not come across and English word for that. 'Avartansheel is something more that recycling'. Lets take the example of a tree. You sow a seed, it grows into a plant and then a tree. It then gives flowers and fruits and through them we get the seed back. This will be termed as a cyclic process. But in this process, all the units involved are getting enriched. The soil, water, air ,tree, seed all of them are more enriched at the end of the cycle. So, in 'Avartansheel' process not only recycling is taking place but also enrichment is happening simultaneously. Lets now compare it with the recycling of plastic or paper. By the end of recycling plastic, what is get is a degraded quality of plastic (and not enriched). And the other units like water get polluted. The same is the case with paper or any other product which is recycled. The process of recycling not enough, nothing short of 'Avartansheel' process will do. Otherwise it is simply converting one kind of environmental problem to another.

So throwing things in the bin or assuming that recycling is the answer will not do. We have to talk about our consumption and waste production. Our generation cannot afford to runaway from this problem. Im not saying lets start throwing our waste in open, but throwing something in the bin is not the end of it. We have to start taking stock of our consumption NOW.