Fire Fodder (continued?)

Fire Fodder (continued?)
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho.

I am almost positive I have a similarly titled photo somewhere on my blog but #1 I am too lazy and impatient to bother finding it on this ass slow connection (read 0-3KiB/s) and #2 I am pretty sure its not the same picture since I embed all my comments etc into the photo itself and this photo has no comment.

So, this seemingly boring picture was kind of interesting for me and a picture I saw from Kabul to Band-I Amir. The little piles you see are scrub, usually the scrub (twigs, weeds, etc) left behind after livestock have grazed the area, this is the stuff not even goats would eat. The left behind brush is collected into piles (like you see in the picture) and then I assume they come around with a donkey and load the animal up with the brush and ferry it back to the village. Many times I would see these piles in the middle of no where and in the evenings I would see Afghans who had gotten a fire started and were obviously settling down for the night meaning, to me, that they were too far to reasonably walk home and then walk back the next day. Wow.

China bans (ok, limits) plastic bags

I just noticed this article (thanks to my Technorati news feed) and it made me thing, especially the line saying "The ban on bags brings China in line with a growing international trend". I think something like this has been done in California (or maybe it was requiring that all bags sold must be plastic that is biodegradable or made from vegetable derived plastics, regardless it *would* be there) but that is about it, sad that the most powerful country in the world should lag so far behind on such issues.

 

Throughout the world plastic bags are everywhere I haven't been to a place that is poor enough (and I have been to some pretty poor countries) to *not* have plastic bags and most of the time they are just lying around on the ground. I will admit that I am not the best about not using plastic bags, if I just buy one or two items I always tell them "save tha bag, I don't need it" and I carry a messenger bag quite often so I put things into that as well but if I have more I usually take the bags they give me (even though I should probably do the crunchy thing and get a bag to carry around). The whole thing is a pity though, and a bit of an enigma, here (Afghanistan) there are people who rummage through trash to find food for their animals and paper/metal to sell to recyclers but free (yeah, it is most certainly built into the price) plastic bags are rampant.

 

 

 

 

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle in the third world

I am always annoyed by the lack of recycling facilities in developing countries; my being annoyed is pretty unreasonable I admit but its still annoying. For many countries it is more cost effective to just import/make more products rather than recycle them so I see things wasted all the time. I do see instances of people reusing things (usually motivated by poverty not by a desire to be environmentally responsible) but not very often.

 

All this got me to thinking about how products could be reused in developing countries. All sorts of ideas have flitted through my mind but I have no idea how reasonable the ideas are. I see plastic bags in even the poorest countries being used and thrown away *all*the*time* one idea I had was for arid places like Afghanistan to patch them together for use as plastic mulch since water is so precious here (then of course this creates issues of trash but quite often I see trash around anyway so in this instance it would at least be serving a purpose).

 

The concept of paper recycling seems to be lost on most people but in Kabul paper can be recycled and it is essentially just processed wood chips so at the very least paper can be used as a very effective mulch.

 

Another idea was using cans as a sort of solar insulation or something like that. I seem to remember reading somewhere a guy that collected soda cans, took the top/bottoms off the cans then nailed the “metal sheet” onto the side of his house which I think helped with heating (cooling?) his house.

 

There are other not-necessarily-straight-up types of recycling like using gray water (bath/laundry water) for things like toilets. There is also the possibility of composting (my organization probably throws away a liter of used teabags a day (sorry, not sure what other measure of volume to us), uneaten food, and throws out the grass clippings and then wonders why parts of the garden look so pathetic.

 

The list goes on, I have seen some interesting things in “mother earth” (no I am not a hippie but I still find most of their articles pretty neat) and I am sure other places but I can’t seem to find a blog of third world recycling ideas… if I thought I could come up with enough ideas I’d start the blog myself.

Fake flowers in Afghanistan

When I was en route to Panjshir we stopped in the town of ?? and purchased some flowers. When they told me they were going to buy some flowers they just said “flowers” not “plastic flowers” or “fake flowers” so I was struck when I walked into the “flower shop” to see wall to wall of fake plastic flowers. Now there is the pragmatist in me that says “hey they last a long time” but then there is my sense of taste (which is heavily influence by my decorative plant snob mother [and she’s damn good at it]) which says “Ugh! Couldn’t we get something else?”.

 

Apparently Kabul is about the only place you can buy fresh flowers in Afghanistan, plastic flowers are totally acceptable here, not something you would find stuck in the ground in some trailer park (like the US).

 

It does make me wonder about dried flowers, or maybe even origami flowers both of which just seem more tasteful to me, but then again I am heavily biased.

 

I can’t imagine that growing flowers (which I think of as being a fairly delicate crop) would be particularly easy but hey, that’s way outside of my league of expertise.