Solid Waste

Solid Waste issues are very different in Kenya and the United States.  The production of solid waste is much lower in Kenya than in the United States.  This is in large part related to the standard of living.  If you have only a dollar a day to spend, you do not produce much waste.  A much larger percentage of peoples’ income goes towards food than in the United States.  But foods are mostly locally grown and purchased at stands.  Every purchase I make is bagged in a plastic bag.  Sometimes the vendor uses two bags.  Plastic bags make up a lot of the visible garbage.  Plastic packaging of laundry soap, margarine, and milk make up more of the garbage.  Glass bottles for soft drinks are reused (not recycled).  If you buy a Fanta (a popular soft drink here) you are expected to drink it on the premises and return the bottle.  But Kenyans do not consume heavily processed foods, like frozen pizzas, tv dinners and the like.  So the amount of packaging used per person is low.

Larger items are often scavenged for parts.  There are a lot of bicycles on the road that would probably be in landfills in the U.S.  There are a fair number of shoe soles.  But there are many vendors who will re-sole shoes so the upper has been saved.  Because labor costs are cheap relative to material costs, it makes sense for Kenyans to separate usable materials from construction debris which in the United States might be trucked to the landfill.

When we moved to our house we asked what to do with garbage.  “Throw it over the wall” was the instruction.  Over the wall of our yard is one of many local garbage spots.  This garbage is burned.  Sometimes a tractor pulling a wagon picks up the garbage, but I have seen them unloading and burning the garbage from the wagon.  Novelist Nicholas Drayson wrote that “The smell of Nairobi is the smell of small bonfires.”  Although the smell is not pervasive here, the method of solid waste disposal is the same.  Burning plastic produces toxic air pollutants, but as I said, the amount burned is not too high.  There may be toxins in the ashes from things like batteries.

Chickens and other animals root through the ashes for edible bits.  We’ve been trying to feed our food waste to a herd of goats which is nearby, but this doesn’t seem to be commonly done, except by chance.  There is a fair amount of litter all over town.  The goats sift through for banana peels and other edible bits.  Despite the sign on the garbage can, there doesn’t seem to be a consciousness about litter here.  I haven’t seen any sign of a centralized land fill or disposal area, although there must be something like this in the larger cities.  Overall, Kenya’s production of solid waste and its method of dealing with solid waste are quite different from the United States.