A special visit to Kansai University: How can we overcome the social stigma of working with trash?

 It was a real pleasure to be invited to Prof. Meli’s class on Eco-Criticism last Tuesday morning at Kansai University. If you’re reading this as a student in that class, thank you all for your participation. It was the first time that I’ve had the chance to teach a university class about trash, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Here in this blog post I want to share some of the information that I found in preparing for the class, and to ask you a question for discussion online.

First, here is the PBS article with the video that we watched together in class. It describes San Francisco’s trash policy and efforts to become a “Zero Waste city”. In the video, you’ll read and hear about the private company that manages the city’s waste, recycling, and landfill, called Recology. Try visiting their website and see how they’re trying to change people’s perception about trash and recycling.

Actually, changing people’s thinking about trash is the topic that I wanted to discuss more in class, but didn’t have time. I mentioned the Japanese NPO Greenbird that I discovered recently, and found SmileStyle and other articles like this and this online as well. In the San Francisco Bay Area of California, many groups organize to clean up trash, and sometimes you can see articles about dedicated individuals who volunteer by themselves. For example, Beverly Knight is an individual volunteer featured in a local newspaper, and ZeroTrash.org is a group that works in several places in California.

Still, raising consciousness about reducing trash and living in a clean environment is difficult work and, I think, there is a significant social stigma attached to the act of cleaning up trash. As I have volunteered with a few friends for several years cleaning trash from the streets of San Francisco and Berkeley, this is one of the main obstacles for me: it’s difficult to explain to my family, friends, co-workers and others that one of my hobbies, and one of my new social identities, is being a “trash guy” who takes pleasure in cleaning the streets. To illustrate this difficulty, in Prof. Meli’s class I handed out copies of this blog post; there I described my experience one day in San Francisco, when I saw a bunch of trash on the street, but still couldn’t move myself to clean it up in front of a group of strangers.

If you have time, please read over the blog post and think about whether or not you’ve ever experienced a similar dilemma of overcoming social stigma. Your experience might be about cleaning up trash, or any kind of social or environmental action that you know is the right thing to do, but that people might look down upon.

• What was your dilemma, and how did you overcome it? Or were you not able to overcome it? 
• Why or why not? 
• What does your dilemma show us about social norms, environmental ethics, and/or cultural differences? 

Please feel welcome to comment here in a few sentences, in English and/or Japanese. I’ll be happy to read about your experiences, and will comment back to you from my home in the U.S.

Thanks, everyone!

Dave

a christmas "lidtree" @ philz

We've had a lot of East Bay activity the last two weeks, highlighted by our pick from downtown Oakland to Jack London Square two days ago. Ray & Dave are hard at work massaging the podcast, which should be ready for release in a few days. And we've had many discoveries of other like-minded pickers and recyclers both near and far, from the folks at Zerotrash.org up and down the state we found when setting up our new twitter account @pickitupSF, to the East Bay Express's cover story "Trashed" about the work of Hank Chapot and the surprising garbage situation at UC Berkeley, to stories about Berkeley recyclers and trash artists Arthur Boone and Mark Olivier, to local artist Jessica who I (dave) bumped into last week at Philz Coffee in Berkeley.

And speaking of Philz, amidst all that there's been a little story growing up in the hallway of that popular coffee spot in north Berkeley, where I like most of the other customers have been tossing my paper coffee cup and plastic lid into the separate recycling and trash containers they have set out there. "Cup separate from lid" because, while the paper cups are deemed recyclable materials by the City of Berkeley, the lids are not. I've been going there for weeks, almost every day in the haze of revising, editing, and formatting my dissertation throwing away cup after lid after cup after lid after cup after...

This got me thinking, because on our recent pick in the Mission district in San Francisco i had re-encountered a bunch of my old nemesis from picks past--the infamous plastic coffee lid, most commonly in white, sometimes in black, and there must be other colors too. While there are some people who apparently sing the accolades of the plastic lid as a marvel of engineering or design, to me they have always represented the pinnacle of consumerist, throw-away culture, objects discarded thoughtlessly by those who ought to know better. Sure there are as many kind of trash out there on the street as there are products being sold in stores (and more) but lids more than anything seem to scream out like the most eager contestants at this year's pageant of trash: "Pick me! Pick me!"

Well, this all happened to be at the time I started learning about some of the folks i mentioned in the first paragraph above, people who have been taking trash collection and recycling to the next level, and people who see garbage not just as something that needs to be whisked away from sight as soon as possible, but something that needs to be made public, and made visible, in ways people hadn't dreamed of. I mean, if you haven't clicked the link up there about Mark Olivier in Berkeley, and seen pictures of his front yard, then try it now...

So I got to talking to Rachel at Philz about whether or not Ray & I could do a little "lid display" right there by the trash cans, something that would maybe make customers like me smile for sure, but hopefully also make them think a little as they threw away another day's cup, another day's lid... I was thinking first about a mobile shaped like a Christmas tree, with the lids rotating in the draft, the whole body of the tree formed by the collective body of suspended lids. That 'sculpture' is still to come, since I was balking at the idea of buying lots of string/fishing line and other materials I would need to make something designed to point out how many materials we buy and trash in our everyday lives.

But then, at home, my eyes settled on a hapless little artificial tree that's been sitting in my room since last year, waiting for its turn to be re-decorated for the season. This didn't seem like it was going to happen anytime soon, so I brought it in one day, and with the blessing of Rachel and the others at Philz, so was born what is the first in-cafe trash installation that I've seen in my own cafe-going days:

In the week or so since, the number of lids has grown steadily--I've added a lot, but we've asked other customers, too, to tie their lids to the tree. And, like you can see here, some have got a little creative with it:

Nice, right? So now, as Christmas approaches and as the end of the holiday season is just around the corner, I'm starting to wonder what is going to happen to all those 100+ lids. Truth be told, it's only a fraction of what customers in this Berkeley store probably use and pitch every day. And these lids aren't probably going to meet a better fate than those in the bin below it, or in the trash can at the front of the store, or in the public cans up and down the street, or those here and there, lying on the streets, waiting to be picked up by neighborhood or city trash cleaners.

But, at very least, I've tried to start bringing a thermos to cafes when I can, and I've had a lot of interesting conversations with people sitting close to the tree when hanging lids. I'm thankful for the good humor of all the friendly Philz baristas, and just want to ask you: if you see me taking a lid for my in-store paper coffee cup, please, call me out on it!!