Why Don’t More Families Recycle?

“But waste not by excess: for Allah loveth not the wasters.” (Quran 6:141)

One question that has puzzled me since I took shahada 20 years ago, is why I don’t see the Muslims recycling their garbage. Surely, there are exceptions, but I continue to be completely baffled by the general level of environmental disregard. I would have thought that in 20 years, we would have made more progress in terms of our consciousness about the burden we put upon our fellow citizens to cope with our daily waste. 

Recently I was visiting an Iraqi family for dinner. When I inquired why they preferred to live in America even after the political situation had stabilized back home, they told me that Iraq is a terrible place to live because it’s full of garbage. After dinner, I watched them stuffing a huge bag full of trash from just one meal! I asked them why they don’t make use of the government trash recycling services, now that they live in a country that has curbside pickup. They said they had no recycling bin. I told them you just call the City and they will give you one. They said it didn’t matter because they had a neighbor who hauls away their trash for them so that they don’t have to pay the garbage removal fee. I was truly shocked.

Their friend is hauling away their garbage for them as a favor, and they don’t have the decency to reduce their amount of trash? Even though recycling is free and garbage dumping costs money? As I was leaving, I noticed that they actually did have a recycling bin in the garage. It was being used to store baseball bats and other sports equipment. I started feeling resentful, like they came to my country just to fill it with garbage! They’ve been here for ten years, their children were born here. At what point will they start caring about their adopted country enough to recycle their garbage? Don’t get me wrong, they have many good qualities too.

The Muslims’ hesitancy to recycle their garbage is all the more perplexing, since one of the most popular dawah pamphlets continues to be the “Environment and Islam.” It points out Quranic verses such as, “Do no mischief on the earth, after it hath been set in order” (7:56), and applies them to the scientific concept of maintaining a balanced ecosystem. This appealed to me as a young person who was terrified by dire predictions that due to environmental pollution, there would not be enough oxygen to sustain human life on earth within 50 years. The threat of impending planetary doom put the fear of God in my heart and made me want to live more consciously. 

When I was a child, there was no recycling. Recycling services are something that ordinary citizens and environmental organizations worked and fought hard for. It began with volunteers collecting recyclable trash at various church and school parking lots. People who recycled were often belittled as ridiculous idealists, but they kept struggling and striving to slow the steady stream of trash into our landfills and trash incinerators. Eventually, citizen pressure resulted in recycling programs in many cities. 

When Ann Arbor, Michigan got its first recycling truck I was 18. I enthusiastically volunteered on the truck for one day, hauling bottles and newspapers from the curb. I gained a lot of respect for all trash collectors, as every muscle in my body hurt at the end of the day! Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his last speech in support of Memphis Tennessee’s sanitation workers, where he compared their importance to that of doctors, because society relies upon them to protect us from disease. Recycling reduces the amount of rotting material by separating the clean garbage from the gross garbage. Composting food scraps in the garden reduces the amount of rotting waste even more. 

Yet, recycling is done by just half of Americans daily, and 13 percent don’t recycle at all. Research points to apathy and lack of convenience being the main reasons people neglect their civic duty to reduce their human footprint upon the earth. In many cases, confusion about what can and cannot be recycled plays a large role. Education and peer pressure seem to be the keys to compliance. 

Pride in home ownership might also go a long way in sculpting attitudes about garbage. In my neighborhood, the streets where most people are renters are usually strewn with garbage while the streets where most homes are owned by their inhabitants are usually clean. People who identify with and value their property are more likely to pay attention to the mess that their garbage creates. Yet, even if we rent an apartment, we can cultivate an attitude of pride in our town, our country, or our planet. 

People who don’t recycle often feel like their efforts don’t make a difference. It may be that people with a strong sense of self-worth might be more likely to believe that even a small contribution to the recycling bin could be meaningful. Immigrants who feel like it’s fine to pollute America because it’s not “their” country should be encouraged to participate in the communal health of our country as a matter of self esteem, and as a baby step towards civic engagement.

Every community usually has at least one concerned individual. This person should help make recycling convenient at the local mosque or Islamic center by obtaining recycling bins and encouraging people to use them. The City will generally have a list of the types of items they accept that can be printed out from their website. Posting these instructions near the recycling bin might go a long way towards reducing confusion. 

Youth groups could play a large role in educating parents and creating peer pressure to recycle. We are fortunate enough to live in a country where we have curbside recycling. Those communities who don’t have it, should lobby for it. This could be a great way to join a cause and cooperate with your neighbors about something that helps everyone. 

Feeling like we are part of a community makes us want to recycle our garbage because of the way our garbage makes us look. It’s embarrassing when you have a huge pile of trash outside your house on garbage day and your recycling bin just has a few newspapers. At the same time, caring about the environment can help us feel connected with others and provide opportunities to work within our community on issues of mutual benefit. 

Either way you look at it, recycling is a win-win solution for society that goes beyond the immediate material concerns of trash removal.

Growth and Decay in Michigan’s Memory Lane

This summer, I packed my four kids into my Corolla and headed for the highway going south from Boston towards Michigan, where I was born and spent my first 28 years. Returning home was a very moving experience, both uplifting and disturbing.

Our first stop was Oak Tree Road in Iselin, New Jersey, where we bought cheap Indian trinkets and feasted on chickpeas, yogurt and fried bread. My daughter Iman and I knocked on the door of the tiny apartment where she was born at home in Piscataway eleven years ago and a kind Pakistani lady and her daughter let us come inside for a moment to look at the place. As we left, I burst into tears thinking of the years of our lives that seem to have vanished without a trace.

Not a lot had changed, but there was no one to visit, no familiar faces; just the ever-tender painful memories of a difficult yet sincere interracial marriage that ended in great loss nine years ago.

I told my children I would take them to the mosque if they wanted because we’d probably run into some of their relatives there, but they said no because they couldn’t even remember them. After learning that their favorite ice cream and candy store no longer existed, we agreed that there was no further reason to stop in New Jersey ever again.

When we arrived in Ann Arbor, Michigan the next day, I showed my children the Georgetown neighborhood where I grew up. While the cement structures I used to climb on as a toddler were still there, the shopping center where there used to be a Krogers, a drug store, a Hallmark gift shop, and a Chinese restaurant was all boarded up. The bank where I opened my first savings account as a child was empty and abandoned. I was not expecting Ann Arbor to look like Detroit! But the most remarkable change was the trees. When I was a kid I used to be able to see my best friend’s house from my porch. But now the pine trees are so huge that you cannot see across the street. While it is indisputably marvelous to see nature towering over one’s old home, it does create a troubling sense of the sheer irrelevance of America’s or perhaps humanity’s continued existence. Ann Arbor’s downtown still seemed to be thriving, and many of my old haunts like Orchid Lane, the Michigan Theater, and Jerusalem Garden were still there. I was startled to discover that there were two halal restaurants, one Indian and one Arab, located at the main intersection of State and Liberty Streets!

Then we took a trip to Detroit, where we stayed at the Duck and Roll Inn, a lovely three bedroom guest house with a duck farm in the backyard on the East Side on a street with many abandoned homes. The weather was scorching hot from a prolonged drought. As we visited in the garden with old friends from my old Wayne State University days, a brush fire across the street turned into a fifteen foot tall bonfire, and we watched lazily as the Detroit Fire Department eventually came and doused it with water. I felt a deep sense of time moving much more slowly than it does in Boston. It was a great relief to feel myself becoming myself again. It was so wonderful to be back among friends, who were practically competing for us to stay with them, even people I hadn’t seen in over 25 years.

Probably the most harrowing but important part of our journey was our visit to the Woodmere Cemetery in Detroit, where my first baby was buried 14 years ago. The Muslim section of the graveyard was almost entirely grown over. Thankfully, we found about four letters of my son’s name still visible beneath the brown, crispy grass. I knew the grave would need some cleanup but I was not expecting this level of neglect. My children and I ripped out grass for two hours, uncovering the stone. We poured the last of our drinking water over the gravestone and used twigs to clean out the mud from my son’s name and the dates of his short life. We worked until we were sick from heat exhaustion and completely filthy from the cemetery dirt. We planted a few wildflower seeds around his grave and prayed for rain, which actually did fall a couple days later. Oddly enough, I did not cry, but felt a deep sense of peace and satisfaction at having rescued my son’s grave from being overtaken by time. He is the only member of my family thus far to be buried in America, and the fact that his bones lay there in that terrible neighborhood with its burnt out buildings and vast expanses of desolation that was once a booming industry, provides me with a sense of permanency that does not exist on any other level in my life.

My family has all moved away from Michigan. All that remains are memories. It was incredibly healing to return to Ann Arbor to attend my high school reunion and to hug every single person that looked even vaguely familiar. For one weekend, I felt normal again. I went back to a time in the past when I knew who I was, and so did everybody else.

People in the Midwest are so polite and nice. All you have to do is look at them and they smile at you. My children wished we could stay there forever among friends, feeding the ducks in the pond, but I have no job there.

Back in Boston, for the past two days, I have experimented with trying to make eye contact and smile at people on the street without much success. They look right through me like I’m not there. Here in Boston, the weather is much milder and the health insurance is free, but people just make you feel so alone. Unless they perceive you as belonging to their socio-economic-political-racial status, they only talk to you if they are scolding you for something like if your bag accidentally brushed against them. When I lived in Michigan, I used to greet everybody and they were happy to greet me. These nine years I have lived in Boston, I have been deeply miserable. My summer vacation has taught me that it’s not my fault. I’m just a Michigan girl that somehow got lost like a leaf blowing in the wind.