I would challenge my friends and family back in the states to try this one out…
Instead of putting your trash out on the street for pick-up next week, dig a small hole in your backyard and start dumping your waste there. It will be amazing to see how quickly your consumption habits change and how environmentally conscious you become.

As you can guess, this is the system for garbage disposal in Malawi. Any trash we make, literally, make a landfill of our backyard. In this light, composting is an absolute must. Any organic waste gets dumped onto the compost pile, which will then be used as fertilizer in the garden where we will grow many of our own veggies and herbs. Soda and beer bottles are all recycled, so much so that, cans aren’t stocked much at the stores and you get a refund on new beverage purchases when you return used bottles. What a brilliant system! Other recycling services do not exist, so we end up making all sorts of consumer decisions to minimize the size of the landfill in our backyard.

For example, the first few times we made pasta sauce we bought canned tomatoes and tomato paste. Afterwards we were left with two tin cans. We couldn’t stand the thought of them sitting in our backyard for the next thousand years. Instead, I will use the cans as water glasses for painting and we now make our sauce from fresh tomatoes, which come in 100% biodegradable packaging…and make way better sauce. Another example, in my suitcase I brought about 20 Ziploc freezer bags. Usually, I would go through a box of bags every two months. That’s 240 bags plus 6 cardboard boxes sitting in the hole in my backyard. I don’t like the idea anymore, of a perfectly useful, durable bag buried out there when I know I can clean it out and reuse. I’m determined to make those 20 bags last the whole year…it really shouldn’t be that hard.

We filter/boil our water, refilling our nalgeens and plastic bottles from the bottled water we bought our first few weeks in country. The yogurt containers get used as Tupperware, and we buy the milk the they sell in little bags instead of the thick boxed version with fancy labeling. Anything that does, unfortunately, make its way into the hole in our backyard gets burned periodically by the gardener to shrink and pack it down. Eventually, when the hole fills up, it will be covered with the red earth and a new one dug.

This system sure does make landfills a personal issue. I look at shopping through an entirely new lens, even though I arrived in Malawi fairly environmentally conscious. I hope I can bring home my new consumption habits, although it might take a toll on my wallet since fresh produce is so darn expensive in the states. In the end, if I dug a hole in my backyard…think it would definitely be worth it!