Trash, Poverty, and Outrage

Trash in a Refugee Camp

 

I’ve never lived in a tent on the street or in a camp. But I have definitely spent too much time without permanent or stable housing. I couch surfed and lived out of my car off and on during my college years. Through that time, I had a trash problem. I ate at fast food joints when I had extra cash and accumulated the wrappers, I had piles of dirty clothes, and at times, pretty much all my stuff needed to fit in a small, old Hyundai.

Partly, perhaps, I am just a disorganized person. But I didn’t have a garbage can, though I did frequently bag everything up and stick it in the trunk for the next time I visited a friend where I could toss my garbage in their can. Mostly, the stress of trying to find places to stay or figure out if I could eat or any number of other problems made trash the least of my problems.

I have been hearing a lot about trash lately.

As we have come to the city in protest of the upcoming eviction of a local homeless camp, one of the issues that has become front and center is the issue of trash. There have been moments I have wished that we could be as enraged about the abysmal conditions people are forced to live as we are about trash along our shoreline.

At the same time, we all get trash is a problem.

Trash is, at least in some ways, the creation of an industrial world. And people who are poor always seem to live in the middle of trash in our globalizing world. I was just in Palestine and the mounds of trash on the edges of neighborhoods and towns was immense. The same is true of poor communities everywhere in the modern world. Poor communities in the United States.

There are many reasons and different reasons for every place. No managed landfills, not enough garbage pickup, people dumping either because they can’t afford the dump or are cutting corners. Or people not being allowed to use dumpsters, which happens frequently enough for people who live on the streets in the US. Or the stress of trying to survive.

All of us produce a huge amount of trash. People living in houses in nice neighborhoods likely produce the most trash—we just do not see it, because of a complex system of trash disposal, pickup, and dumping in huge heaps or waterways far out of public eye. And people living in houses in nice neighbors need to put very little effort into trash disposal.

In camps along the river, the folks who live there are constantly fighting a losing battle with trash, as people move in and out, as they look for places to dump it, as they constantly battle the cold and wet to stay dry and more stuff is ruined.

Even as we find better ways to deal with trash, our real outcry ought to be that people are forced to live in these conditions. No one chooses to live in muddy, wet, crappy conditions if there are better options.

Now that I have stable housing and regular garbage pick-up at my rental, I should note that I found I wasn’t such a messy person after all. I really enjoy not having trash laying around.