NOT OUR PROBLEM

With nostalgia, I remember running to the local snack vendor at the corner of our side street in Lagos, Nigeria with loads of old newspaper. My maternal uncle was and is still an avid reader. He would religiously buy slews of newspapers from different media houses in order to entertain the different perspectives of the varying journalists reporting for each news outlet.

Naira notes would exchange hands, some puff-puff (fried, thin, buttery dough balls) would fill my tummy and my customer would sing a popular song for kids bearing my name to me. Besides being very popular amongst the merchants in this bustling side street, I was inadvertently practicing environmental sustainability.

Undoubtedly, we all benefited from this practice, my Uncle and I; tons of knowledge, clean rooms, wads of Naira, bottle soda, perspectives and topics of discussion for every night; ranging from the political matters of the time to the jokes in the second-hand "Reader’s Digest" he bought from Yaba on fridays. The food vendor benefited - limitless heights of paper to sell puff-puff with, and to use as fuel for her large saw-dust stoves, saving money off kerosene /coal purchase. I loved how the mess in my uncle’s room/library became gold at the puff-puff stands.

Until recent years, the norm was to find the biggest stainless steel/ceramic bowl in your house when procuring food from the popular food vendors. The prerequisites were simple and standard; bring a clean, covered bowl in a raffia basket, of course along with your money. Nevertheless, there was always soap and water to wash your hands and plates with, should you be unable to fulfill these behests. You could either bring your own stainless plates or eat in, with the vendors’ and have your fill of water with their utensils and from jars of water placed atop the tables. No one sold food in plastic plates or plastic bags; styrofoam plates and cups were alien.

Always, the streets were clean and the “Kole-Kole” guys, for a bargain, would take your trash to the designated waste disposal sites. Then, came plastic and Styrofoam popularly called disposables, and our nirvana vanished. Our gutters would fill with these huge piles of containers, hindering the drainages during torrential rainfalls as is the case in South-West, Nigeria. The waste disposal sites were not equipped to manage this kind of waste, hence the waste would pile them in landfills, constituting an eyesore in our communities.

Plastic was never the problem, laziness and society were, we didn’t want to wash our plates, we didn’t want to return soda bottles to the vendors, we didn’t want to wash our hands. We laughed at those who brought their stainless plates and raffia bags, then we applauded those who bought food in disposable plates and tossed them onto the streets, and the vendor who sold only “pure water”(purified water in sachets), plastic soda and placed the disposable plates in plastic bags for take-out.

In reality, the saga of plastic in the environment is not our problem, our double standards are. We need to whip out our stainless plates and take them back to the streets.

*Kole-Kole (garbage disposal artisans)