Tell me about your trash, I’ll tell you about where you live

An archaeologist once told me that people generally thought of grand temples and castles holding the secrets of the past, but that the one could really learn the most from people’s trash. This is no less true for modern societies.

America’s garbage speaks to a consumer lifestyle built on cheap energy and raw materials together with a seemingly endless landmass to dispose of it. In Brazil, a growing middle class generates trash that is delivered by truck to burgeoning landfills where trash pickers extract raw materials and resell them to  recyclers, a process detailed by the phenomenal documentary Wasteland. Indonesia offers a different take on the developing nation model: a growing middle class prospering from an expanding economy piles up waste that is largely hauled away in hand carts and sorted by the same trash haulers, the subject of an amazing BBC documentary.

It’s the developing-world scenario in that most favors recycling – a wealth of consumers to produce the trash and an army of the destitute to sort and recycle it. Grinding poverty appears to be one of the developing world’s only solutions to solid waste. My cousin Liz would know a lot more than me about this. After only six months living in Jakarta, she’s volunteering twice a week at a kindergarten/playgroup for the kids of a nearby trash picker community, known as a kampung. 

Their homes and their workplace are one and the same compound where the trash is hauled in by cart. Some areas have raw trash, other places are piled high with bags filled with sorted plastic bottles or crushed aluminum cans. 

The definition of recyclable material extends into scraps of paper, detergent packaging or shreds of plastic bags. In contrast, here in Caracas I can only recycle tin cans once every two months during special recycling operations carried out by an environment NGO. Tell me about your trash, I’ll tell you about where you live.

Materials that don’t make Indonesia’s definition of recyclable are burned next to makeshift homes, the smoke from which wafts across a large wall that separates the community from a neighborhood of stately townhouses. 

Teachers and parents from the Jakarta International School arrived on a Thursday morning to much fanfare and joyful shouting of the kids. 

When we reached out to shake the kids’ hands, they would hold it to their forehead in an endearing sign of respect. They cleared out a space and laid out a tarp that everyone sat down on, then led the kids in singing songs in English, playing connect the dots, coloring and reading stories. The beauty and spontaneity of the children was only enhanced by the squalor of their surroundings.

 I found Indonesian children remarkably charming, quick to laugh, and fun. These were no exception, even though the only words I shared with them were “satu, dua,” “one, two,” enough to play an elementary version of patty cake. 

Bagas and Dinal were two exceptionally smart kids who were evidently hard workers at school with handwriting considerably better than mine. The mothers, some wearing traditional Muslim head covering, sat on the edge of the group and laughed along at the jokes. They’ve realized that education and access to English are the only things that can ensure their kids’ job doesn’t turn out to be the same as theirs.

A sudden downpour sent the kids scurrying off without saying goodbye, though the rain dispersed as quickly as it arrived. On the way out of the kampung we said hi to a group of women sorting plastic bottles. One sat carefully removing the thin plastic band on the outside, like the strip on the Gatorade bottle with the branding and ingredients. Those don’t recycle, she said, tossing them onto a smoldering pile.

The work with the kampung fortunately extends beyond recycling into upcycling. A local organization called XSTransformed uses the raw materials pulled out of the garbage, along with corporate waste material, to produce a range of consumer goods. Artist Ann Wizer founded in the group in 2000 after moving to a home in Jakarta next to a kampung and began working with them to find material that they had no way of reusing. Today the group makes tote bags from vinyl pendants or signs, trash cans from detergent packaging, small pouches or wallets from other discarded plastic. XSTransformed has an agreement with a local automaker to receive unused vinyl seat covers (they cars are assembled in Thailand but in Jakarta they replace the vinyl with leather - this material has not been in a landfill) that make great material for bags.

The employees will wash the different materials they receive from the trash picker families. On our visit they were washing, soaking and drying blue detergent packaging. Those are sown together by other employees into consumer products.

Later in our trip we visited a second project with kampung, one that had been developed by a local organization over three years to move kampung families into proper homes. Located in a small satellite city outside Jakarta, the project recruited families to build 20 proper homes and helped them get out of the garbage business. The area included a community center space that was also used by children of people in the community next door that still lived off trash, as well as in and among it. The idea is to convince families to get education for their kids. With donations from shipyard Keppel, the organization maintains long-term supervision of the project to ensure families can have long-term opportunities.

The Jakarta International School has an agreement with XSTransformed to buy laptop sleeves that they issue to all their students, which gives the group steady clients. But it also left me thinking whether adolescents would end up misplacing or discarding these products the way we do with so much other stuff that comes through our lives. While that might stimulate demand for upcycled products, but with the obvious corollary that it would create more trash and waste hours of labor. This world of throwaway culture does not make it easy to close the solid waste loop.