Bin there, done that: Trash collection in Joburg leaves a lot to be desired. Photo: Delwyn Verasamy
‘Insulting or boastful speech intended to demoralise or humiliate a sporting opponent,” is The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of trash talk.
Beefy Americans are top of the pile when it comes to trash talking. Think of those lanky basketball players who always have plenty to say as they run endlessly up and down the court.
They seem to burst into a trash-talking celebration at every touch of the ball and every tackle. If our rugby players — who spend the whole game smashing violently into the opposition — did this, there would be no time for much else.
Trash talk is relatively harmless compared to talking rubbish. Here the competition is much stiffer with politicians, social media morons and, yes, newspaper columnists jostling to be top of the rubbish dump.
Let’s be honest, we are all guilty of talking rubbish sometimes but it is the people in positions of power who can cause the most harm with their garbage. Fights, arguments, diplomatic spats, wars of words and sometimes even wars with lethal weapons can be the result.
But all this pales into insignificance when the thorny subject of the disposal of waste in our cities comes up. It is like opening a can of worms, although perhaps that metaphor is too realistic.
In a relatively young city like Johannesburg, which is going through constant, rapid changes, rubbish is a major issue. And it elicits more heated opinions than there are rats at the local dump.
Pikitup is the entity responsible for waste disposal in the city and, on the surface, their plan of action in residential areas is a simple one.
Every household should have a wheelie bin in which they place their bags of rubbish. On a designated day of the week the giant truck comes round and empties them.
But the men in the truck only take away what is in the bins. Plastic bags, broken couches and smelly mattresses, placed hopefully next to the bins, are ignored.
Garden waste is also not accepted by the rubbish truck dudes. From bitter experience I have learned that trying to sneak carefully cut up branches or piles of weeds into the bin will result in loud whistles and shouting at my front gate on rubbish day.
Although there is no official record of this, it is generally accepted that bags of garden refuse left on the pavement will be collected by a different truck that does the rounds on a semi-regular basis.
And this is where the problems start. Pikitup’s method of picking up the rubbish is fine when there is one happy family for each house in suburbia. But, with the masses of people flooding into Johannesburg, many suburbs are becoming much more densely populated.
Space is rented out per room, unscrupulous landlords build warrens of rooms in backyards and the wheelie bin is totally inadequate — or has been stolen and never replaced.
Bags of household rubbish join the more acceptable bags of garden refuse on the pavements every day of the week.
And, of course, these bags end up being torn open and their contents spilled out.
Loose rubbish and smaller plastic bags from supermarkets join the growing pile and these places become established dumping areas for the surrounding houses.
The bags are eventually picked up by the men on the trucks but they don’t clear up the spilled mess. This for the foot patrollers (mostly women), whose thankless task it is to try to clear up the chaos.
The piles of rubbish on the corners regularly get so big so that Pikitup has to send in a truck with one of those mini ganda-gandas to scoop up the rubbish.
These developments bring out some of the worst instincts in long-standing residents of the suburbs, who vent their anger on the neighbourhood WhatsApp groups. They apparently can’t understand how people can so carelessly destroy their pristine neighbourhood.
There is a desperate search for somewhere to place the blame and many say it is “foreigners”, who don’t care about their living environment, because they are just here to make money and return to their home countries.
Others say that people are desperate for accommodation, battling to find a job and don’t know how they are going to feed their families. Finding an acceptable way to dispose of their rubbish is not high on their list of priorities.
And we haven’t even ventured into the densely populated flatlands in the city centre or Hillbrow, or the many crowded shack settlements that don’t even have toilets, never mind wheelie bins.
Pikitup just can’t pick it all up. It needs more resources. It needs a better plan. And, to be totally selfish, it needs to find a solution before the value of my property drops any further.