It rained today in San Cristobal.
Inevitably, when this happens the streets are filled with garbage and stray dogs vying for a meal of freshly relocated rubbish. What is also inevitable is hearing tourist complain about the garbage in Mexico, noting how much cleaner it is in Canada, the USA, etc.
It’s the early 1970s in San Cristobal, you’ve lived here all your life. You are planning a trip to the market to get food for you family. First you stop off to buy some tamales. They are wrapped in corn husk and banana leaf. You place 8 in your cloth shawl that is used as a side bag and walk to the next stand.
There you decide to buy tortillas. You place a towel on the counter and buy a half kilo for your family’s lunch and dinner.
Maybe some Horchata? You pass a glass jar to the woman who makes the rice milk and cinnamon drink. She fills it and you pass her your pesos.
A dead chicken goes into your mesh sac, black beans into the burlap you’ve used 50 times before, peppercorns into an old cigarette tin. Speaking of cigarettes, you decide that you would like to smoke (better do it now, in 30 years you’ll be too well informed to light up) so you roll some raw tobacco into a piece of rice paper. Tomatoes, chillies, onions, and mangos all go into the shoulder bag. You walk home.
You decide to go on a picnic with the meal that you’ve created. Everything is either in banana leaf or a glass container. You drink the Horchata out of tin mugs. When it’s time to leave you put all of the glassware along with the tortilla towel in your shoulder sling, throw the banana leaf and corn husk on the grass to decay, and walk home.
This changes one day.
The 1970s brought a new era for Mexico, in that new era came a world of products from other nations. With NAFTA in the early 1990s, individual packaged product from Canada and the USA became readily available for all families.
When Canada and the USA moved from the reusable to the disposable single serving market, we did it slowly. As production stepped up, so did financial gain for the governments, which meant money for infrastructure, planned incineration of rubbish, eventually recycling.
In Mexico, this influx was sudden. From one year living as you had always had, to the next being able to purchase a variety of international product. However several important things did not naturally evolve like they did in the rest of North America. The first thing was that though wage did have a slight increase, according to citizens.org as well as worldsaleries.org (two independent statistic groups) the cost of living rose so dramatically that is now harder to support oneself in Mexico post-NAFTA.
Because of this there was not an influx of money to the Mexican Government (tariffs could no longer be placed on most exports) which meant that waste services, recycling, and public education could not be funded and instituted nationally.
So now it’s 2011 in San Cristobal, you’ve lived here all of your life. You go to the market to get food for your family. It’s been moved away from the new tourist areas so you need to take public transit.
First you stop off to buy some tamales. They are wrapped in corn husk and banana leaf, though the Massa flour that they’re made from is now shipped from the United States in plastic coated sacks. The vendor place 8 in a plastic bag and you walk to the next stand.
There you decide to buy tortillas. You buy a half kilo for your family’s lunch and dinner, they’re wrapped in paper.
Maybe some Horchata? The woman who makes the rice milk and cinnamon drink fills up a plastic cup for you to enjoy as you walk. She fills a plastic water bottle with enough for you to take home and you pass her your pesos.
A dead chicken goes into a plastic sac (or you get it in foam and saran from the Supermarket), black beans come in a non-reusable plastic bag, peppercorns in a baggy. You decide that you would like to smoke (though you know the health risk) so you take the cellophane off of the coated cardboard box and toss the fiberglass butt on the ground when you’re through. Tomatoes, chillies, onions, and mangos all go in their own plastic bag. You take a bus home.
You decide to go on a picnic with the meal that you’ve created. Everything is put in takeout containers or plastic bags and bottles. You drink the Horchata out of Styrofoam cups, the rest is eaten off of disposable plates. When it’s time to leave you put all of waste into a plastic bag, walk to the side of the hill that you live on, and toss the rubbish onto the hill side where it won’t decay. There are no bins for you to put it in, no garbage man to pick it up….plus you’ve grown up tossing your (once biodegradeable) waste on the ground. Then you take a bus home.
Later someone who is visiting from another country will walk by your trash and complain about the sad state of affairs that is environmentalism in Mexico. Then they will later return home to their job manufacturing soda for export, or selling Maquiladora-made garments.
This isn’t a good-guy/bad-guy scenario…..but it is a look at the cause as opposed to the effect.
I challenge you to go through your day as normal, but when you’re done with a package, put it in your purse or pocket. At the end of the day, dump all of your personal rubbish onto your kitchen floor. Then look at that mess and multiply it by a week, then by a family, then by a village.
I feel the key is not finding corn and soy plastics, vamping up fuel-heavy recycling plants, and condemning those around us who don’t live as we see fit for us. We need to change the way in which we consume. We need to insist on waste-less options. We need to ensure that with any development in trade, we can also support our partners in sustainability and internal supports….or at very least not prove detrimental in the manner in which we introduce commodities.
Our global neighbour is…..our neighbour. Don’t throw your junk in their backyard.
