Ecology in India

I have never been a stellar conservationist; I confess to not doing my part to preserve the planet’s resources. I use and probably waste lots of “stuff.” I note that in India I have become much better at preserving, re-suing, and not wasting. But a lot of this new-found sensitivity comes from my fear that once I use up item x,y, or z, I have no idea how to replace it; of if I do have an idea, I will need to travel to some distant place to do so. As I have mentioned, we don’t have Target, Staples, Costco – these big box stores where you can replenish everything. Jordan was toying with a small retractable tape measure that I brought with me….I requested that he not fool with it lest he break it, and I don’t have a clue where to buy such a thing. I still have a lot of supermarket plastic bags from NY here that I used for packing….I use them judiciously since many stores don’t provide plastic bags when you shop. My showers are brief and water-conserving; lest the hot water tank gets depleted. (There is a hot water tank associated with each of our four bathrooms; they guarantee short showers unless you don't mind cool water.)

India policy appears in general to be much more ecology-savvy than we are in the US. Public transportation runs on “compressed natural gas.” I see schools with signs outside saying that they are PVC-bag-free zones. I tried to get a bottle of water at Adam’s school; they said they don’t sell plastic bottles and that they are a plastic-bottle-free-zone. This was interesting during the really hot weeks in summer, when I wanted to grab some bottled water from the school to take on the road as I left the school on my way to work. It was over 100 degrees, and you cannot drink water here that isn’t filtered, and so if you don’t have a bottle with while you are commuting, you are sort of stuck. The ecological sensitivity is lovely, and I guess with the size of the population in India, failure to respect the environment can have awful consequences. But it also seems like it might be a bit early for some of these dramatic moves. Amnon said it was like declaring the top of an erupting volcano as a “no smoking zone.”  The pollution issue here is dire with unclean air and an unclean and undrinkable water supply. So it might still be premature to ban plastic bottles of filtered water. But I suppose you have to start somewhere...

We are accustomed at home to separating our waste products – paper, plastic, glass, and general waste. There is no such separation of household waste in India, at least not in our community. At work, there are separate trash bins for “wet waste” and “dry waste.” I don’t quite know how to interpret that…if a napkin has some moisture around the edge, is it “wet waste” or “dry waste”? Is “wet waste” supposed to be liquids that you are discarding?  One of my colleagues has advised me not to fret too much. He used to be concerned as well, but then noticed that the maintenance people that remove the garbage ultimately throw it all into a single bin. On the other hand, I see people on the roads cycling with big bales of paper, or plastic waste. So it looks like poor people are sorting through disposed trash, and identifying components that they can re-sell. It appears that India does have disposal separation, ultimately. In the US, we do it on the front end, as we sort our disposable products. In India, the sorting occurs on the back end, as people filter out the disposables that have already been discarded and extract items that have resale value.