Environmental activists– We have so much love to hate
ALEXANDRA – Share the roads with environmentally active trolley pushers
Strangely, after we trash the street and public spaces with rubbish, many snarls hatefully at those who collect our waste for recycling.
Some hurl unprintable insults at these trolley pushers and some do the best they can to push them and their trolleys off the roads. This affects their work of ferrying away our own waste in the interest of our environmental health. Illogical, isn’t it?
The festive season will witness more rubbish to collect for these trolley pushers. With less traffic anticipated on the roads, they will be in brisk business cleaning and clearing our waste, trudging a full day with heavily laden trolleys along the roads. Still, they will do so at the mercy of the remaining irate drivers who care less for the benefits they derive from these poor souls. There hard work of selling our waste often nets them a pittance they use to put food on the table rather than resort to crime.
Instead of being thankful for their unsolicited effort, some despise them. Many are oblivious of their role as unsung heroes who haul the dumped glass bottles, plastic and paper which they take to the multi-billion recycling industry for production into new reusable products which will again re-enter the recycling industry in a perpetual system with consequences to the environment. Still, some continue their aversion to them and view their role with disdain and as a nuisance rather than explore ways to improve and help them in keeping Mother Earth cleaner.
Many of the trolley pushers possess matric certificates and could enter tertiary education. They choose not to remain idle and choose not to get into a life of crime. They opt for this hard work to remain busy and exploit the gap created by the City of Joburg’s programme of waste separation at source. They pull and push their trolleys, open and take what they want from residents’ bins from dawn to dusk, but still some remain hostile to them.
It is to our benefit to be more courteous to them and suggest better ways to integrate them into the road network and the main stream economy as they are an asset and something we can’t wish away.
They are like the car guards many of us have warmed up to with the belief that they also double up as security for our parked vehicles.
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