June 14, 2007--Garbage

Yesterday morning at La Consigna, after the siempre—cortados, orange juice, aqua sin gas, and a toasted pan integral with butter but no jam—a muscular man of about thirty-five shimmied up the palm tree out front and disappeared up among the fronds.

Almost immediately a shower of cut fronds and other tree debris tumbled down; and when he was finished with his pruning and slid back to the sidewalk, the tree was nearly denuded—it was a so-called hard pruning, just right someone assured us for this high-growth time of year. And around the bottom of the palm, covering much of the walkway and spilling out into the road was a huge pile of his cuttings. Rona said, “I hope they’ll clean this up soon—look what it’s doing to traffic.” True, a long line of cars and panel trucks that had slowed to either avoid the falling vegetation or, more likely, to have a close look at all the excitement, stretched back to the turning in the road.

We finished and needed to go to the market to assemble what we planned to have for lunch—you get the picture of our day: coffee followed immediately by working on our next meal—and less than 100 meters up the street, where there were equivalent piles of palm droppings, was the truck Rona had hoped would be there with a man seemingly sorting through the fronds and dried seed spikes and frond cowls.

About twenty minutes later, all we needed were a couple of tomatoes and a melon, we retraced our steps since we hade parked south of Consigna. We noticed that the man with the truck had indeed been sorting through the prunings and he had separated them into three neat piles at the bottom of each tree—fronds, the cowls or circular parts of the fronds that attach the fans of green to the trunk, and the knurled seed spikes. We assumed that they would subsequently be collected separately and then used, recycled, in at least three different ways—for thatching, baskets, and who knows what; but certainly nothing would be just tossed away or wasted.

This was not really that much of a surprise since obviously Europe in general is considerably more Green than we in the States, both the result of a culture of thrift that comes from a history of periodic bouts of scarcity and because they have legislated more rules than we about the source-separation of garbage, power usage, open burning, liter-per-gallon minimums, and even to not allow anyone to heat their swimming pools with any form of fossil fuel.

So when in our Rome here we act accordingly. Though back in New York we are attempting to act more responsibly, we even bought a string bag recently to cut down on our need for plastic supermarket sacks, on Mallorca we become instant recycling fanatics. Even before adjusting to the six-hour time difference, we pour over our refuse, dividing it into myriad categories and stashing in a variety of receptacals. The back seat of our rental car, for example, can no longer accommodate passengers since we have set it up as a mini, mobile source-separation vehicle. The far left-hand corner is devoted to empty clear plastic water bottles; right next to it is our space for tins; in the middle we stack cardboard, neatly torn into two-foot-by-two-foot pieces (we haven’t yet switched over to the metric system—maybe by next visit); and next the cardboard we place a neatly-folder pile of old Herald Tribunes, Majorca Daily Bulletins, and El Pais’s. You get the picture.

Oh, we simply toss our vegetable scraps over the lip of our terrace balcony as a form of compost for the greenbelt below,

The current municipal system (more about this in a moment) requires everyone to bring refuse to collection points scattered throughout the area. Which we do every few days when we have accumulated so much refuse in the back of our car that I can’t see out the rear window. In truth, in our mania we have established more recycling categories than the town requires. They do not have receptacles for glossy paper as we do in our trunk so sometimes we toss our newspaper inserts and direct mail brochures in among the cardboard while at other times we add it to the paper bin. We plan to write to the municipal counsel about this—just as soon as we have enough Spanish.

Not withstanding the glossy-paper conundrum, the island has the recycling situation under control. The garbage situation, on the other hand, is something else.

Until this visit, in our La Mola community, each villa or complex of flats had its own container for trash. Good citizens still brought glass and plastic and paper to central collection points though that was not required. You could put everything into your local container and it would be picked up twice a week and then things that could be recycled would be recovered. Sure, this cost money to do but, let me be frank here, it also provided work for some of the less-than-legal immigrants who have boated over here from equatorial and north Africa.

So either to save money, out of mean spiritedness, or some combination of both, the PP Party (Spain’s equivalent of Republicans) made it illegal for us in La Mola at least to have our own trash containers. Every scrap, therefore, must now be brought to the collection stations. This shouldn’t prove to be the end of civilized life as we knew it. After all, the rich folks in La Mola (and this is the very highest-rent district) have staff to deal with garbage and everything else while the rest of us are used to various versions of separating garbage at home and disposing of it in more complicated ways than just tossing it down a chute or into a pile.

But there is still a lot of grumbling going on because no one likes change of this kind, especially when no one here got a tax refund for the government doing less. At least we haven’t yet seen any checks in the mail, and don’t expect to.

Something else, though, appears to have been unleashed by this new policy—everyone in our area now seems to be as obsessed about garbage as we. And it has nothing to do with recycling.

If you are concerned about the lack of political and social activism—for example why people who are furious about and opposed to what is being perpetrated in the Middle East are so passive, no mass marches on Washington—here on the precipitous heights of La Mola we have action in the streets. And it involves garbage.

During the past few weeks, since the new ordinances went into effect, much of La Mola has become, how else to put this, a dump. In the absence of our fondly-remembered rubbish bins and the requirement to bring plastic and such down the hill (something everyone was pretty much doing anyway) each morning we find yet another street corner that has become an unofficial site for cardboard, wood scraps, plastic drop cloths, rubber tubing, or empty paint cans. And of course, since there are no services to pick this up, where one day there was just one discarded appliance box, by the end of the week, there may be half a dozen more.

So while Rona and I struggle to understand this sociologically and culturally, as it is our wont to do during our evening walks through these, in spite of this, still-glorious streets, unable to decide if the new rules have unleashed a streak of latent Spanish anarchism, or the obstinate feeling that-if-you-require-me-to-do-something-I’ve-already-been-doing-voluntarily I’ll do just the opposite, or if this rampant trashing is just the result of simple laziness, whatever its root causes we have decided to enjoy it, yes, to see it as another expression of Mallorcan “foreignness” (dare I say “authenticity”?) something to try to assimilate if we want to come eventually to “belong.”

Actually, we hope to see the new rules revisited, our treasured containers restored or, failing this, a change in local culture (to speak anthropologically).

In the meantime, we are doing two other things—first, during our sunset peregrinations we are neatening-up the informal or indigenous trash piles (how’s that for political-correctness?); and second, on those nights when we return home from dinner past midnight, with the vino still running in our systems, we have been known to load up our car with the junk and schlep it down to the recycling bins.

To tell you the truth, though we can force ourselves to think about this as a form of charm, or strain to understand the “cultural contradictions”—why for example do people who paid 3.7 million euros for a villa accept living with heaps of trash right at the entrance to the long stone-paved drives—rather, I wish everyone up here would just behave a little better.

Sorry, I know to call for “better” behavior is a culturally-ladened and constructed way of thinking about things. But garbage is garbage, and there’s no way to sugar-coat it. Though I should try to come up with a better way to put this.