Woot's: Pura Vida Pt. 3: So Much Waste

"High" in the mountains of south central Costa Rica is a small village called San Gerardo. It's about an hour an a half via bus from San Isidro. And while the distance isn't that far. It makes a stop ever other kilometer or so to pick up people heading up the slope. The town itself is the epitome of mountainous Costa Rica, at least the image that I had built up in my head. Small houses surrounded by coffee farms and banana trees. Misty mountain peaks and the sound of cascading water rushing down the mountain. At the time we arrived, we had only been on the Pacific coastal area and this was a welcome change of pace.

The bus stop is adjacent to a soccer pitch and there is a row of bars, small cabinas, and an even smaller store. What looked like a mobile cell tower was parked along one of the side streets and a church was set in the background. At 11:30 in the morning, it wasn't hot, but not cool either. The sun had burned off the morning mist, and was preparing to perform the daily routine of returning it back to the already saturated earth that made everything lush and verdant.

From the bus stop, we had to climb the mostly unpaved road (unpaved except for the steepest of slopes) to our guest house. San Gerardo is used by climbers as a starting point, and resting point, for the climb up Cerro Chirripó, the tallest mountain in Costa Rica. Surrounded by a private nature reserve (Cloudbridge), and Chirripó National Park, this area is full of things to explore and most appealing to us, full of peace.

San Gerardo, our Guesthouse was behind us, straight up the mountain.

San Gerardo's relative remoteness created a very interesting dynamic, which I found very appealing. In this town, trash is collected only once a month. So you have to be very conscious of your actions regarding what you use and what you intend to throw away. The guest house where we stayed was located next to a restaurant, and the only real place to get a drink without making the long trek to town. After a long hike I went there to buy a couple of beers. Using my very adequate food Spanish, I ordered a couple of beers and began to walk back when I was stopped and asked if I was taking them away from the restaurant. When they realized I was not going to drink them in house, they wanted to pour both in paper cup so that they could keep the bottles. Returning the bottles to be re-used by the bottlers is a normal thing that actually has a financial incentive. After assurances that I would return the bottles, they let me leave.

If you have been to a Central American country, you may have noticed the same thing. This goes beyond simply recycling. This is returning the used bottle directly to the producer to be cleaned an re-used. In Nicaragua, they did the same thing, only with glass bottles, but with plastic ones as well. The two liter plastic coke bottles are made with a higher grade plastic. There is no paper label, just the Coca Cola label printed directly on the bottle. Sure, it is often faded and nicked here and there, and it doesn't have that brand new look to it, something that I am sure would not go over well in the States. But it really made sense from a sustainability perspective.

In fact, it seems our ideals of what using resources means, is skewed way out of proportion to what is actually reasonable, not even ideally, but just reasonable. Everything that could be composted, was composted. Everything that could be grown, was grown. The showers had hot water thanks to a mechanical shower head that heated the water right there, no water heater tank needed. No where in sight were plastic spoons or single use sugar packets, or paper plates. At Casa Mariposa there was an effort to simply reduce what is simply becoming a major, yet mostly unrecognized problem for the majority of the United States, how much stuff we simply throw away.

Don't get me wrong, it's not like Costa Rica as a country has this collective spirit of reducing waste. There are plastic bags at every grocery store, mercado, mercadito and so on. Nicaragua is worse. However, one of the striking differences between these two bordering countries is the amount of trash that is around. Costa Rica is a far cleaner country. Often at times, cleaner than here. I overheard one kid talking about how there was a lot of trash on the beach at Domincal, I couldn't have disagreed more. There is 5 times more litter on Palm Beach, FL than there was at any beach in Costa Rica.

But to get back on point, being back has in a way been a culture shock to see the way we live in the States. Being served coffee in a Styrofoam cup and using individual packets of sugar that, after being used could be composted but aren't. Seeing a shopping cart full of plastic bags that could be easily replaced with re-usable canvas bags. Not enough emphasis on recycling plastic bottles, BOTTLED WATER! And a myriad of other seemingly easy things that are just wasted.

The final point is that in no way does reducing our waste reduce our quality of life. We have a society that fixates on convenience and consuming and more consuming. But really, we can take steps to just be better at not sending so much stuff to already full landfills. It's said that there is not a single beach on Earth that is plastic free. But if we put in the effort (it's such a minuscule amount of effort) and we are aware of how much stuff we use, maybe we can start to reverse this.