Recycling 101

Recycling in North America is undeniably an industry. We appreciate that so much of the packaging and products we consume can be repurposed and recycled just by dumping them in a can by the side of the road. It is certainly easy - sometimes so easy that we forget that the first two of the three R's are REDUCE and REUSE. 

Not so in Kenya. Every product we buy at a "western" style store has packaging, every product that breaks or wears out has to be disposed of somehow. And at our station, we spend a lot of time talking about the best method of disposal. Recycling is not an industry in rural Kenya - it is an art. An art that we are trying to become better at, when REDUCE and REUSE fail us. 

A comment on reduce and reuse: one reason recycling has not yet hit rural Kenya in a big way is that reduce and reuse are the way of life here. For subsistence farmers, "packaging" is a non-issue. You don't package the eggs that your chicken lays before you consume them, so you don't have to worry about plastic vs cardboard egg containers. You don't wrap your vegetables in plastic wrap before you cook them for lunch. The amount of waste in their lifestyle is minimal, and for those storebought items that do produce waste (a jar of cooking oil, for example) there is almost always a way to repurpose them. Plastic cooking oil containers are reused over and over to deliver milk or kerosene, for example. 

Waste disposal is a problem everywhere, of course. Here, people have traditionally burned waste. However, not everything burns, and not everyone wants to burn. Trash pits attract animals, and the trash gets scattered around the environment, not to mention the fumes and toxins and greenhouse gases created. The alternative is a "dump" - which in our region is just literally a spot someone picked in the forest to dump trash. Again, lots of wildlife are attracted to this, and unfortunately people may also try to find treasures in the trash, which can put them at risk of injury digging through potentially dangerous refuse. At this point, there isn't a great third option, although we continue to discuss and desire another way.

What follows are the ways that we have been learning to reduce, reuse, and recycle:

Buying locally: Our eggs and milk come from our neighbors and therefore don't require any packaging

Making smart choices at the grocery store: Looking for packaging that can be reused or that can break down naturally, which is often a better choice than traditionally "recyclable" materials in N America like aluminum cans.

Socks and underpants wear out and can't be repaired and passed on as hand-me-downs:

So, they find a new life as filling for a new stuffed monkey:

Our pop gets purchased in glass bottles that are reused over and over. We bring the crate of "empties" to a shop in town, where we trade it in for a crate filled with full bottles of whatever kind we choose (our favorite flavors here are Krest Bitter Lemon - Kim, Stoney - Kris, and Fanta Blackcurrent - Dominic)

Even medicines get recycled here! When I was struggling with a post-viral cough, my neighbor kindly gave me here barely-used inhaler :) Our hospital doesn't take previously distrubuted or expired medications, and thankfully we no longer have to re-use needles or normal suction tubing. But we do routinely reuse (after soaking in bacteriocidal solution) several medical supplies including those little blue bulbs used to suction out a baby's nose and mouth after delivery (for any OB/Gyns out there: also Kiwi vacuums, amniohooks, suction tubing and curettes for D&C)

Saving up our recyclables: We have a spot in our house for broken electronics that we take or send back with visitors to the states. Disposing of those electronics at the right place means that those rare metals can get reused instead of burning up in a pit fire; we save certain plastic containers to bring to Nairobi where we know they'll be accepted at the grocery store chain where we purchased them; we pass along our glass bottles to a shop in Eldoret that makes them into drinking glasses and storage containers.

If I had to guess, these containers may have previously held soy sauce or olives

Have other great recycling ideas? We would love to hear them! Better yet, come to rural Kenya and help us learn to be better stewards of the beautiful environment here!