Madwaleni can do it....

The Transkei can be a frustratingly dirty place at times; I bought a 'coke' for a senior member of staff the other day and he had no qualms whatsoever about winding down the car window and throwing the empty can into the ungergrowth. I slammed on the brakes, reversed the car and asked him retrieve the can as if he were my child rather than my boss. Luckily he took it in good spirit and was actually embarassed by his actions but many other people see no problem whatsoever with this kind of behaviour.

The concepts of re-use and repair are part of Xhosa lifestyle but care for the beauty of the environment is not and recycling is a largely novel concept. You see re-use all the time, be it plastic shopping bags or bricks from broken down houses. There is also a culture of repair with many items of clothing being constantly mended until there seems to be more patching than original material. The cars on the roads and particularly their tyres are technically well beyound their usable time but people seem to keep them going. But at the same time people are very happy to discard anything which seems to have no further use or monetary value even if it causes a dreadful eyesore.

This is where the corney title of 'Madwaleni can do it' comes in. Drinking from cans has been faily unusual up to now but is on the increase and at the moment cans go the same ways as everything else with no percieved value- into a rubbish bin if you are lucky or to the side of the road if you are not. Cans in South Africa are mostly made of steel rather than aluminium and have a recycling value of approximately 2.5 cents per can (that's South African cents not US cents). It's not much and transport costs would essentially reduce the value below zero. However, staff frequently make trips to Durban in large and fairly empty cars which means transport at close to zero cost is feasible.

The trick now is to collect the cans efficiently. This is easier said than done when the value to the individual is so small and only a community effort will be worthwhile. My plan is to collect around 40,000 cans which would be worth R1,000 and be enough to buy something useful for the community like a small childrens playgound. So far my efforts have been lame and commical. Whenever I am near the rubbish bins outside the shops I sift through for the cans and show people the large empty water container that we have set aside for collection. Needless to say the site of the doctor going through the bins only makes people think we are even more crazy than they already thought. My next plan is to build some kind of 'tree' with magnets hanging from chains and somehow try to pursuade people that the thing you do with cans is not put them in the rubbish bins or discard them but acutually they need to be hung from the tree on a magnet. We can then collect them daily for safe storage. Wish me luck with that one but whatever happens we will have fun trying and we might even end up with a new swing and a see-saw for the kids in the end.