Consumption-sumption, What's Your Function?

Today's New York Times included a guest op-ed by Jared Diamond about the unsustainable consumption rate of the United States. (Which I will not link to because it mentions things I am not allowed to mention.) Obviously, the human impact on the environment is a hot topic these days, garnering Nobel Peace Prizes, countless headlines and endless redesigns of product labels. Oh, wait, that last thing - that's the problem.

One of the most difficult things I've had to adjust to in Morocco has been the rate of consumption here. And with good reason, according to Diamond, I'm accustomed to wasting at 32 times the rate of residents of developing countries!

Here, there is a nearly pathological resistance to waste. Even seemingly well-off families are averse to discarding a potentially useful plastic bag. (I've seen them hand-washed and hung on the clothesline to be reused again.) Candy wrappers, soda cans and gum wrappers virtually don't exist in homes, because individual servings are anathema to how most people function. Families eat from communal dishes (no plates) with their hands (no utensils) and they share one cup for water (fewer dishes to clean, but more "microbes" to pass around). Left-over food, like orange peels and bits of bread are fed to the animals. (Did you know that donkeys love orange peels and cats like bread?) The vast majority of people don't even use toilet paper! (Is that TMI?) The little bit of trash that is produced by the average family is mixed with palm fronds and burned in order to heat the communal bath, or hammam.

The down side of all this is that when there is no system for creating waste, there is no system for collecting it. The fields I walk through every day are strewn with plastic bags that flew off clotheslines, piles of half-burnt trash that was too hashuma to give to the hammam keeper (if you want examples of hashuma trash, please send me an email and I'll be happy to explain) and other random things lying about. No one appears to care, because it's not in their, well, backyards.

When I move in to my own home in February I'm curious to see how many of my old habits will return. Under the scrutiny of my host families, I have managed to produce only two or three very tiny bags of trash, which I take into Oz to discard with some semblance of anonymity. (Though, today, a group of boys started yelling "Peace Corps! Peace Corps!" at me. It must be the large, black sunglasses and unwashed hair that gives me away.) But I already have plans for eating yogurt every morning, and that involves individual containers and that involves trash. Oh, the shame! At least I have a lovely collection of plastic bags stowed away in my suitcase. That, however, is a habit I picked up from my lovely, American grandmother.