The King’s Green Pad

Seeing and smelling piles of burning garbage littering the landscape was definitely something I needed to get used to when I moved to Nigeria last February.
The most common items discarded are small, black, plastic bags. Go for a trip to the local market and you are bound to come home with at least three of these bags. They are one-trip kind of bags, not reusable at all. But the worst part is, they’re not generally burnable material either. The mentality is: what can’t be burned gets buried, so they end up peaking out under years of packed dirt.

As much as I am disturbed by the use and ‘disposal’ of these bags here in Nigeria, most of the food does not come with the kind of excessive packaging we find in Canada.

Imagine if all the garbage you collect in one week was not taken away by a garbage truck, but rather piled in your front lawn, waiting to be burned. How big would that pile be? How much packaging surrounds the foods you buy everyday? Are you serious about recycling and reusing, or is it merely a nice sounding philosophy? Just because our waste is taken secretly from our back doors rather than on public display, does that give us the right to use and throw away whatever we please? Let’s not allow our garbage to go ‘out of mind’ just because the garbage trucks take it ‘out of sight!’

This post was written by Janina Mobach, alumnus of The King’s University College.

Janina Mobach with a tailor in Nigeria

Links:

Pictures of Janina in Nigeria

Edmonton: Reduce / Re-use

Re-use Centre