By Dilenia Carolina Rodriguez
Every day on my lunch break, I have the option to choose from countless take-out options: salad or grain bowls, a smoothie or a snack. And every day, I have the option to buy something that comes in plastic, plastic-reinforced paper, or cardboard coated in a hard-to-pronounce forever chemical.
I come from a small municipality in the Dominican Republic called Esperanza. Do you know what that means? Esperanza is a small, new town. When I was a child, there weren’t many concrete roads. Us, the neighborhood kids, would play in the middle of the dirt road. Not many cars were driving around, aside from the platanero that would come around dinner time with fresh produce.
None of us had “real” toys. We had to get creative with the games we played. We would take old orange juice cartons and lids from plastic bottles and make a car with an attached string to drive it down the street. When we found plastic bags flying around, we’d build chichiguas (a kite) with sticks arranged in a diamond shape and a cross reinforcing the middle. During baseball season, we’d take the lids from plastic water jugs and play vitilla. There’s no wonder Dominicans are so good at ball. We would play matao, filling a bag with other soft trash to make a ball. It’s similar to a game of dodgeball. La alcantarilla is like a game of hide and seek, but if you’re found, you’re supposed to run fast to the center circle and rattle an old tomato sauce can full of rocks, and that’s how you win.
I want to talk about the trash, but it feels futile. Every day at lunchtime, there are thousands of people in line at the salad bowl place, using the same disposable utensils: a bowl, a fork, a plastic bottle, and all the plastic packaging that comes with it. Every day at lunchtime, the piles of discarded single-use containers overflow from the garbage bin, never sorted.
These days feel like a different life. I’m in New York working a corporate job in midtown, the center circle of the world. How far is that from Esperanza, do you know? Before this job, I was dead broke, matao, looking for any gigs I could hold on to. A friend suggested an evening gig conducting trash audits. What is that? In an effort to find solutions on how to become more “climate friendly” or “green,” corporate buildings in Manhattan conduct trash audits of a typical workday’s trash haul.
On a warehouse floor of several thousand square feet, piles and piles of garbage bags would be lined up to be inspected in the audit. It stunk rotten, like vomit, like the juice at the bottom of the subway tracks. The job was to set up tables and sort the garbage produced during the workday. Weigh it and divide it into parts. What can be recycled or composted? The glass, electronics, fabrics. How much garbage can a fifty-something-floor business skyscraper produce in a single workday?
There were thirty of us conducting the audit for a full eight-hour work shift, with some breaks in between, but we only sorted about 25% of the trash in the room, classified into what could’ve been recycled, composted, or disposed of in an efficient manner. The rest was weighed. More than two tons of garbage that day. In the end, all the trash, even the sorted pile, was thrown into the same garbage truck that would eventually go to a landfill. After the shift, my clothes smelled like the pungent liquid at the bottom of the garbage bags.
I want to talk about the trash. Every day I have the option to choose from an assortment of take-out lunch options: a salad or grain bowl, maybe a burrito or wrap this time? A juice or a smoothie to wash it all down. I work in one of those buildings where I conducted a trash audit when I was broke, and I feel ashamed when I see the office trash can fill up, knowing that even if I throw my trash in the recycling bin, it’s all going in the same garbage truck, and the landfill. No kids will be making toy cars or chichiguas from this trash. It’s not like in Esperanza. Do you know what that means? It means hope.
Today I brought my lunch from home, a grain bowl and smoothie in reusable containers that I will use again tomorrow. Trying to produce less garbage than yesterday, using the resources I have today, and planning to make less waste tomorrow. Like the kids from the place I came from, I have hope.