Burn, baby, burn!

In Tanzania, the answer to unwanted trash is simple: incinerate it. In the good old days, this probably wasn’t too problematic, seeing as trash was largely confined to coconut husks, animal bones, sticks/wood, and vegetable waste, which burn relatively cleanly. Controlled burning of undergrowth as a wildlife management strategy probably also has its place. But the modern era has brought flammable chemicals and plastics to Tanzania, as well as increased population density, and I am not so convinced that incineration is the best policy anymore.

In villages and towns, each house has a burn pile within a few feet of the house, and people tend to live fairly densely, so in the spirit of sharing, neighbors breathe each others’ trash-smoke on a daily basis. Smoke from coconut husks and cleared grass is one thing, but smoke from vaporized plastic bags and water bottles is entirely another, and sets me into choking coughs, blackening the insides of my nose. There is no escape.


Burn pit behind a house where we stayed

Matt noticed when we were at the safari lodge how the landscape – our view of the mountains was breathtaking – was marred by smoke from dozens of small fires. Some of the smoke is trash fires, others are fires set to clear underbrush in cashew orchards and to manage game. But there is so much burning in rural areas that many times you can’t see the sun set below the horizon, you see a hazy orange orb slip beneath the smoke layer.

The situation isn’t unique to Tanzania. When we lived in Ethiopia there was one day per year that everyone burned all the extra trash lying around, which made the air gray with smoke so thick that you could feel the particles settle on your skin. It puts “Code Red” air quality days in the US to shame. We heard that this day was an annual observance, the brainchild of an expatriate almost a century ago who was concerned about the poor sanitation standards in the city and was trying to encourage people to get rid of trash that could breed disease. Fair enough, in a city of 100,000. But in a city of 4 million, and when said trash includes tires, plastic bags, and petrochemicals, the strategy leaves a little to be desired.

I certainly have reservations about burying trash, the preferred method for trash disposal in the West, given that we make so much trash, and that it is made from all sorts of synthetic compounds not good choices for oxidizing into the environment. But imagine what our world would look and smell like if we burned all our trash!