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| Wednesday, 3 December 2003 |
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Living off junk by Tharuka Dissanayake Kandasamy is a scrap dealer. A well-to-do one at that. He complains to me that his six million plus house is stalled because of 'cash-flow' problems, and because of this, he is selling some aluminium waste for cheaper than normal. Despite the tricky negotiations on this aluminium deal, he does not ignore the small customers- a man who wants to purchase some old magazines and myself, waiting to buy an old barrel. He fishes out the barrel himself and proceeds to knock vents into it as per my request. His service is excellent, but his entrepreneurship makes an even better story. Kandasamy is talkative. He recites his story with certain pride. The 15-year-old who ran away from a remote tea estate in Rakwana with just 25 cents in his pockets, would not have dreamt of building a six-million rupee house, owning land and sending his children abroad to study. But this is what he achieved. By merely selling scrap and waste- by establishing that vital link between junk and people who can use junk. This man's success and the mushrooming number of scrap dealers around made me ponder over the whole business of junk collecting. We throw away so many things, and here is a man whose made his fortune simply by making that very trash a resource. Kandasamy feels that Sri Lanka is becoming a wasteful nation- "just look at the amount of bottles, jars, tins and plastic containers we just throw away." He is not far from the truth. In this 'disposable' age we have everything pre-packaged, tinned, canned and boxed. Use it and throw it has become the motto and many product advertisers flaunt it- the convenience and ease of pre-packaged goods. Today, we have become a market for disposable PET bottles which are used to package soft drinks in the 'mega' size, mineral water, oil and such. These bottles are not recycled in Sri Lanka at the moment. So the more we throw- the more it will accumulate in the environment. Making money off waste is not new. Remember the bottle-and-paper man? Remember the parana-coat people, who used to roam residential areas searching for good deals in old clothes and household items that people had no use for? Whatever happened to them? They obviously died off at a time when it was more convenient to dump unwanted stuff on the roadside and wait for the local authority to clear it away. Today we consider it worthless even trying to sell old papers, bottles and tins. I hardly know of anyone who sells used tins- salmon, canned fruit, jam or milk powder. It is so much easier to throw than to collect and sell to recyclers- especially because the price you are paid for the collected old bottles and tins is so low. And yet, given the choice of simply dumping on the roadside and making the effort to deposit non-biodegradable containers at a scrap shop, responsible citizens should take the latter option, I think. The compensation for that extra effort will be the feel-good of making an eco-friendly choice. But what Kandasamy really got me thinking was- the amount of employment opportunity that lay hidden in the mounds of garbage that our local authorities collect daily. Scrap collection and sorting is a huge employment generator in some countries that take recycling efforts seriously. These people can earn above-average payment for their labour too, compared to daily-wage earning casual labourers. Collecting and sorting is the biggest issue for recycling. Many plastic and polythene products that can be re-used and re-processed, are junked because there is not adequate sorting of the different types of plastic materials. By encouraging more and more recycling enterprises, the government can easily provide employment and extra income for a large number of people as sorters and collectors; addressing at the same time the difficult environmental issue of garbage dumping and unsightly landfills. |
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