Rubbish

Kabul is so dirty. I went out for a short walk yesterday, just as far as Chicken Street, where the closest DVD shop is, and the sight of the fetid piles of rubbish littering the streets and clogging up the ditches put me in a bad mood for hours afterwards. Needless to say, it is not only the sight of such mounds of rubbish is noisome, the smell is enough to make me gag, too – especially near the butchers’ areas.
I really cannot understand why it is so much dirtier than every other city I have been in, including ones that have an otherwise comparable socio-cultural environment, such as Iranian and Tajik cities.

Of course, Kabul city administration probably does not have enough resources to deal effectively with rubbish collection and disposal, but I think this is only part of the problem. After all, Tajikistan is just as cash-strapped and receives less international aid, but Tajiks do not seem to litter so conspicuously, and regularly take the initiative to burn the piles of rubbish outside their homes – which may cause air pollution, but I’d still rather a few hours of black smoke to relentlessly growing mounds of stink. Tajik students engage in more or less voluntary clean up operations on a regular basis, round town and the universities - a Soviet practice (the subbotnik) that seems to have survived the meltdown.

Kabulis on the other hand don’t seem to have too much civic pride – surely understandable after years of war and uncertainty, but I wonder how it will change.
Tin cans whizzing out of moving cars are a common sight, the Kabul river is a stinking trickle of dark filth wending its way past rusting barrels and car parts, and mounds of rubbish obstruct the entrance to shops and houses. Sometimes, in a stomach churning variation to a bucolic theme, a plump flock of sheep can be seen grazing on the rubbish mounds, nosing aside the plastic bottles to unearth the juicy morsels beneath.

Perhaps understandably, Afghans do have a great love of picnics in natural beauty spots, and wax lyrical at the drop of a hat about the clean air and pure mountain water of Afghanistan, but they stop short of taking home the litter from their picnics or taking a long, hard look at what makes the rural picnic spots nicer than Kabul (for now).

I think part of the problem is that, such mounds of trash must have caught Kabulis unawares. During the years of war, before the main roads were repaved, it must have been much harder to import the consumer goods that are such plentiful sources of rubbish, with their bubble wrap, cellophane and other non biodegradable claptrap. With peace, have come vast quantities of comprehensively packaged Chinese electronics, air conditioners, and a multitude of soft drinks in mixed plastic, hard to recycle containers. Once you have finished drinking a cola, there’s nowhere to throw the bottle but the ditch – and even if you do go to the trouble of bringing it home and putting it in the trash can, that will only be emptied into some other, larger ditch elsewhere.

Living in Kabul only really brings home the worldwide problem of rubbish disposal, as of course there is nothing uniquely selfish or reckless about the Afghan approach. The mounds of rubbish are much larger in richer countries – and getting larger all the time, but discreetly tucked away in underground cement lined chambers, giving nothing the chance to rot, but also (we hope) minimising the chance of toxic spillage. Last I heard, the British government was having trouble finding sites for waste dumps (strangely unpopular with the locals) and was looking at the idea of paying poorer countries to ‘dispose of’ British rubbish. How’s that for a sustainable solution?