Secret Asian Man- Trash in(g) Amman

Long time readers may recall this writer’s infatuation with trash and how it gets where it’s going.  I feel like I’ve spoken about it a lot. From looking out my front window, this is my thoughts about how garbage is handled in Amman once we generate it and leave it outside of our front door. .All of this is based on hearsay and observation.

Sulieman our boab, (house elf) , makes a couple of rounds per day to all the units in our building collecting garbage and taking it to a set of dumpsters in the vacant lot next door. This is combined with trash from 8 or 10 other buildings.  Dumpsters are dispersed every 500 feet or so on the main roads.  Back streets have a bit longer walk to throw things away.

A standard city garbage truck swings by and empties dumpsters 4 or more times per week.  I don’t see them on Fridays, but they can show up most days usually just before dawn, and just before my alarm is set to ring.  

In between collections, a variety of other visitors happen by the dumpster.  It starts with the cats.  I don’t know where they go when the dumpsters are empty, but when full each dumpster generally has 2 or 3 felines per dumpster. Balanced along the rim or deep inside the garbage. Sustained on a diet of plastic bags and food scraps. I haven’t seen a lot of rats, but certainly there must be some.  

Bedouins or refugees make the rounds of the neighborhood.  Typically, they have a rusty white pick up or other utility vehicle that leans to one side, is lacking a muffler and most functioning forms of illumination. The driver stops, hops out and grabs a nearby rock to throw under the front wheel to save him having to chase his car down the hill.  

He proceeds to pull plastic bags out of the dumpster and throw the contents on the ground, taking what he needs. Usually metal, but also cardboard, cloth and other scraps.  The remainder is scattered to the winds.  The plastic bags take flight. Jordanians call plastic bags, their national bird.

Glass is not recycled. And after nearly 2 years of wondering why, I finally learned the answer.

The areas around dumpsters are strewn with broken glass. I wondered for a while, why glass wasn’t more valued.  We tried for a while to gather glass separately, but it would be taken to the dumpster and then thrown on the ground.  

It turns out that the closest glass recycling plant was in Syria. After the troubles there, the border shut down and no one could get the used glass up there, so the market crashed and no one wanted glass.  Another consequence of the ongoing conflict there.

The ground around the dumpster, as you can imagine, becomes a bit of a toxic mess of glass, food scraps and other detritus.  Bin Men circulate and sweep and scoop things up and try and keep things manageable. 

Once a month, a front-end loader drives by and either scoops up trash or grades over it with a thin layer of dirt and rock and for a week or so, things look rather tidy.

If you want to get rid of more valuable items, the scrap buyer circulates. A large loudspeaker mounted on the cab announces what he’s buying.  It plays and ear splitting volumes.  He cycles around twice, so when you hear him the first, you move your stuff to the curb and catch him the second time around.  

Where the collected trash goes from the dumpster, I’m not sure.  I presume to a landfill of some sort.  Some place where all the “birds’ can roost together and flap in the wind.

Oh, I Love Trash

This is a trashy tale. An tale of the refuse that leaves my house....besides this blog.

I'll preface this by saying this is purely an anecdotal tale, based purely on observation, nearly non-existent research, and lots of speculation.

As with many of the posters on the Internet, I don't have a lot of time to devote to digging for answers.  

I'm also lazy and illiterate in the local language. Which probably also applies to many things written on the Internet.

I don't know quite why, but I've been tuned into what happens to my trash since I got here. Maybe, because I'm surrounded by so much garbage, maybe because the system seems so efficient and horrifying at the same time.

This is the cycle of trash as I see it.   

The yards in most homes in Jakarta are walled and somewhere in the wall closest to the street is a 2'x2' metal door that leads to a 3x3 foot concrete box. Some of these boxes have lids, some do not. Mine does but it's rusted open.

It's into this concrete box that all my secret Asian trash flows. Paper, glass, plastic, food scraps, yard waste. If we don't want it, that's where it goes.  If it's been a busy week, the box overflows. If not, it fills half the box.  

Once a week or so, a man comes.  I think that I pay him $1.50.  He unlocks the door crawls through the 2’X 2’ door and pulls out all the trash.  

This is where the first sort takes place.  High value items like glass, metal, discarded gold bullion are taken here.  I know this because our pembantu has asked us to presort this stuff.  Cardboard is also valuable.  So much so that she keeps this and has her friend come get this separately. Yard waste is cleaned out of the box and piled on the curb outside.  Everything else is re-bagged and hauled away.  

The yard waste sits on the curb for an undetermined amount of time. Someone must come for it, because the pile ebbs and flows. Some must rot, some definitely blows down the street.

The bagged trash is taken down the block It is piled in the shadow of, and downwind from, a gleaming new office tower. This is where the next sort takes place. Extraneous food and food just beyond its use by date is taken by people.  That deemed unfit for humans is left for the rats. What the rats don't get, is left for the dogs and the cats.  That is the animal hierarchy in this concrete jungle.  What the animals don't eat rots in the sun.  

Paper is separated from the good plastic. Plastic like cups and bottles is good plastic.  That is all taken and recycled by whoever gets there first.  The, now often opened garbage bags, filled with unusable things like plastic bags and cellophane are sometime piled, but mostly they are strewn there on the road.  Winds come and blow it down the street.  

Once every week or two, someone comes along and scrapes what is left of the piles into a large dumpster and hauls it all away to who knows where. It is lost to me.

The yard waste and plastic waste that has blown away down the street ends up in two places. Neither of them are good.  

Some of it blows into drainage ditches, which lead to canals, which leads to rivers, which leads to the sea.  It blocks at choke points and stops the whole city up. It is a major cause of seasonal flooding. There are men whose job it is to clean up plastic from these choke points 24 hours per day.  For if it's ignored, the city will drown.  

The other place the wind borne detritus ends up, is the curbs and gutters where it is swept up daily by

neighborhood street sweepers into nice neat  and tiny piles and promptly set alight into illegal fires.

Flying in over the city one can spot thousands upon thousands of these tiny fires spewing blue, carbonized plastic smoke and filth into the air. Nanometer sized particles are inhaled by the millions of us who neglect to wear a mask likely accumulating in our lungs, blood streams and end organs, saved for further disposition until our likely untimely deaths. .

See what I mean?  Plastic to ashes, ashes to dust. It is totally efficient.

Neighborhood Digest

We’ve moved to our forever home and have been exploring the new neighborhood.  Here are some things that I’ve learned.

I think I mentioned how street addresses often don’t make a lick of sense.  Stroll down a typical street and see the house address change randomly from #2 to #26 to #81 to #7.  It makes getting anywhere in a cab or by walking just maddening as you never really know how close you are to your final destination.  

We think we discovered why.  It seems that house numbers aren’t set up according to any sort of grid or plat.  Duh.  It seems house numbers are assigned based on the order they were constructed on a street.  So, #1 was the first house on the street, #2 the second house built and so on, no matter if #2 is actually seven lots away.

It sort of makes sense in a short-sighted, ordinal sort of way, but no sense from a city planning view.

There is a kicker, too.  If you tear down a house and rebuild a new house or even significantly remodel a house, you get a new address.  So, say our forever home used to be #3, but it was gutted and rebuilt on the exact floor plan.  Our new house number may be #34.

 Here is something you don’t see back home.  This is a Secret Asian Man image of a man at a mall scrubbing the curb of the entrance by hand.  Not hosing it off. Not sweeping, but scrubbing with a scrub brush.  The difference between how private and public spaces are treated is remarkable.  

Walking the dog early the other morning, it must have been trash burning day.  We walked past 6 or 7 small unattended fires burning in the gutters.  Leaves, branches, plastic bags, cups, all the detritus of a city wafting into the morning air.  The ashes blowing down the street, adding to the grime.  Probably soiling the curbs of the mall, who knows?

This is likely the saddest thing that I’ve faced in a long time.  This is Bonita.  She is a macaque monkey who lives on a platform in the park nearby. She belongs to the family on the far side of the park.  She is fed a good amount of food and they seem to look after her, but it is still a pretty sorry existence.  

A few dinner time conversations have been held about how to spring the monkey.  None of the scenarios end well for us, or the monkey, so we walk by this suffering daily.  I’d like to befriend the neighbors to get the full story and I’ve asked our house staff to find out all they can.  I guess we’ve got some time

I’m told of an even sadder activity.  A few years ago, it was all the rage to take these monkeys and chain them little toy cars, dressed up in clothes.  The owners would then cut the eyes and the backs out of a baby doll head and fit them over the monkey head and then train the monkey to roam around a park begging for money.  This, to me, is just the epitome of creepy.  I’m not sure if people pay for the novelty or to make the scary, monkey-baby go away.  I’m told they cracked down and banned this, so it is not as common anymore.  I don’t have my own image, but here is what I’m talking about.

Maybe, that was how Bonita started out? Maybe, that was how our neighbors got their big house.  On the backs of Bonita and her friends.  

We drove by her the other day.  Mrs. S.A.M. said, “That monkey looks so sad.”

Our driver said, “Yes. I think it because she not have a friend.”

Yeah, that could be it. It could also be that she’s chained by the neck to a pole in the middle of a city of millions.