M

y family and I just got back from our long vacation and as soon as we stepped foot in our home, we were back to the annoying familiarity of garbage in our yard.

We are blessed with a house at the corner of three alleys, which makes our place a convenient stop for food cart sellers. Also close to our house are two food stalls and a playground.

This makes our front yard a merry station for gatherings for children and other neighbors that flood our front yard with colorful garbage of food and drink packaging.

What happens is, again and again, children buy food, drinks or toys from the sellers. Before they enjoy them, they unwrap and dump the covers, and often there are leftovers, somewhere in our front yard.

We can reap one full bag (30x50x80 centimeter cubed) of this kind of waste every week.

It was our choice to live in a small kampung. We love the friendly neighborhood and the fresh, cool air.

But like other dwellers in our area where there is no reliable sanitation service, we have to deal and manage our own garbage.

For the first time in our lives, we had to live a little bit green, that is by separating our garbage from non-organic and organic.

Next, we learned how useful percolation pits (something my mom used to use) were, and how annoying plastic waste was.

We buried the organics, we burned the non-organics. But soon we encountered the foul smell from burning plastic that makes us choke and impacts on our health.

Once my brother said, “We don’t realize how terrible we are, thinking that littering once will do no harm.”

It seems everybody is thinking this way and doing this again and again every day and every where. Let’s say Jakarta is populated by 10 million people, and each of the 10 million throw just one little piece of garbage.

We then end up with 10 million piece of garbage at the one time.

And what will happen in a day, a week, a month and so on?

Mountains of garbage for sure.

If you want to see this phenomenon at work, just look down at the railway tracks, where people enter and exit trains.

Look down in the bright sunlight, you will see how sparkling the pebbles are next to the tracks because of the many little plastic candy wrappings.

There are some other common scenes you can find, as you look around. Every morning, some uniformed men and women diligently sweep the street, but where there is no good coordination with the garbage truck driver, they just throw their garbage at any spot that is close to them, invisible from the street. Then the job is done.

Or check an empty land plot. Next time you come to visit, you will have a mountain of plastic bags full of stinky garbage.

The more boards saying “Do not litter here” you put, the higher the mountain gets.

As I try to understand this situation, my mind swerved to my childhood 30 years ago, when my mother took me to a traditional market.

As we walked, many sellers called out offering the new arrivals, plastics in the form of kitchen and table wares.

I can still recall how they tried to convince us that the products were genuinely made in Japan.

My mother and I walked by and like most other housewives at that time, she preferred to use metal and organic utensils. She was environmentally friendly because the price of plastic kitchen utensils was so high back then.

Now, plastics is dispensable. I could put the blame on the latest cheap wrapping technology of plastic, styrofoam, aluminum and so on, but I realize that I should start with myself.

I still forget to bring my own bag to the markets or shops, or prefer small-to-medium-size wrappings because the volumes are perfect for my need when I know they only contribute to more waste. Let’s do that.

Meanwhile, I really hope that companies that use non-organic wrappings, such as food, drinks and toiletries, do something to the waste they have produced and focus on their community and social responsibility on waste.

Not an easy task at all, though I wish it was as simple as saying “Ya gabba gabba garbage gone,” the magic word from a children’s program to make things disappear.

I agree with what the head of our neighboring unit once said.

“We should start with awareness and our attitudes to make our home clean.”

— Ruth Oppusunggu