Although Indians have traditionally reused and recycled, the waste bin is a relatively recent, modern and largely urban phenomenon.
Over my first couple of trips to the certifiably developed US of A, I came back with two enduring images — the first was large parking lots with hundreds of cars parked in front of every mall, office, block of apartments and just about everywhere, and the other was cool people sipping ‘soda’, or coffee, from gigantic paper cups with lids, and then chucking those — usually with about half the contents still in there — into huge bins that you could find just about anywhere! I presume hordes of us came back home with such symbols of development. The trash can quickly rose up the ranks of development indices. Our economic growth brought along with it the idea of disposable incomes, consumption cycles, large supply chains, packaging and in tow behind all this, mountains of trash both inside and around the city!
However, in the Indian context, the idea of garbage, and the waste bin, is a relatively recent, modern and largely urban one. People used to rarely need to throw stuff away, and pretty much everything had another use, or was recycled into something else, after its primary use was done with. Even amidst the growing affluence and numbers of trash cans, there is thankfully a bunch who, at their core, have not felt comfortable with this change in behaviour and are doing not only their own personal damnedest to reverse the trash menace, and sometimes even changing mindsets around them. Read more
Source : deccanherald.com
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