Trash

One of the biggest problems in India, as in many other developing countries, is trash. It is everywhere you look: on sidewalks, parks, beaches, next to the roads, everywhere. There are no services that can deal with the amount of waste that is produced every day, especially since more and more things are disposable and made of plastic. This has serious welfare effects through many channels: health issues related to open air landfills, environmental issues having to do with trash-burning, water contamination through chemical seepage, aesthetic costs of seeing trash everywhere ruining the landscape, and many others.

In all the places I’ve seen so far I cannot help noticing the trash lying around, the plastic bags and bottles, tissues, food wrappings, all sorts of things. When I visited Marina Beach in Chennai I was taken aback by the amount of trash lying on the sand. And I won’t even go into water pollution due to sewage. The same in Mexico; I remember going to Acapulco once and walking on Revolcadero beach. It was filthy. I won’t even tell you the kind of things I saw floating on the water or lying on the sand. But in both cases everyone was so happy enjoying the ocean! I could not understand it. Did they not notice how dirty it was? Did they not care? And the immediate question was why do I notice? Why do I care? Is valuing a clean living space something that grows with income? With education? Do we have different preferences over trash/cleanliness? Or do we have the same preferences and face different constraints? Is the free rider problem so big no one will act to make things better even if they would prefer it that way?

I do not know the answer to these questions. What is true is that even if people want to put their trash in a bin, there are none (this is the constraints story). I have looked very hard and I do not find any (except for the funny animal ones). This used to be the case in Mexico City 10-15 years ago (lack of trash cans, not availability of animal ones), but at some point the city government started putting trash cans everywhere. It made a difference*. More anecdotal evidence supporting this idea is that many people’s reaction when they hear I study in the US is to ask what it’s like; “it must be very clean!”, which means they do see a difference.
The other side of the coin is that maybe there are no trash cans because people won’t use them (preferences story). They are not used to putting trash in a trash can (let alone separating it or recycling it). For example, the other day I needed to throw a tissue away and one of the train attendants saw me and took it from me, only to throw it out the window! I was appalled. I felt responsible. Whyyy?

Another issue has to do with sheer scale. Even if people put trash in designated places there is no capacity to process all of it. So most waste ends up in open air landfills (not necessarily outside villages) and after being scavenged by people and animals it will probably be burned. You see trash scavengers everywhere, with their dirty rags trying to find something of value in the heaps of waste.

Which brings me to another point I have to discuss in more detail later; in Mexico you do not see the landfills or the people who live from them if you don’t want to. In India you see them everywhere, you don’t have to go far to see slums, everything is mixed. I am presently staying in a guesthouse in a nice neighborhood in Hyderabad, Banjara Hills. Half a block from my house there is a vacant lot that has turned into a slum and a dump (where this morning they were burning some trash. Great). And it’s no problem, the neighbors don’t care about the stray dogs or the bandicoots (pig rats) roaming the place.

But regardless of Indian particularities, the big question is how to deal with waste in settings with low education, low government capacity, and where trash is definitely not a priority? Will rising incomes do the trick? How long will that take?

*I remember going downtown when I was 15 to visit Palacio Nacional and in my then naïve idealism being very upset by the fact that there were no trash bins (I thought it was such an easy thing to do, and the fact that not even that was achieved spoke of the incapacity of the government). But things have changed. After Slim and Fundacion del Centro Historico saw a business opportunity and took over there are trash cans every 20 meters, which in addition to city sweepers (an unemployment and political affiliation policy of PRD) makes the area be clean.