Why Do I Sweep Our Sidewalk?

 

“We’re going to make it so clean that people are going to be embarrassed to throw anything on the ground.”

—Walt Disney, 1901-1966; We all know who this guy is!

 

“Industrial pollution and the discarding of plastic waste must be tackled for the sake of all life in the ocean.”

– Sir David Attenbourgh, b. 1926; renowned British naturalist and documentary filmmaker. (Yes, he is 100 years old!)

 

“Plastic pollution is a global issue: killing wildlife, contaminating our oceans and waters, and lasting far longer than it is used.”

– Leonardo DiCaprio, b. 1974; American actor, film director, and environmental activist. 

 

“It is the worst of times but it is the best of times, because we still have a chance.”

– Sylvia Earle, b. 1935; American marine biologist, oceanographer, explorer, writer, and lecturer. 

 

Am I Crazy Or Simply Obsessed?

 

Lately I have taken to sweeping the sidewalk and around the trash containers in front of our apartment building–cleaning up the leaves that constantly flitter down from above and gathering up the odd but inevitable empty beverage bottle and candy wrappers and cig cartons and butts. Lots of plastics, of course.

Some of the nicer apartment buildings actually have a salaried “portero” who takes care of general building affairs, watches over the entryway, and who will do little things like tidying up the sidewalk. (Our humble finca doesn’t have one.)

Then there is the huge army la Ajuntament de Barcelona has contracted to comb the urban environs on a regular basis with their stiffy brooms, vacuum mini-trucks, monster trash trucks, and so on (chapeau to them, heroes all!)… But they only seem to get around to our street once a week or so. AND, I do not think I am taking work away from them (as a passerby once implied) as there are many places around the metro area I could direct them to if they ever find themselves idle (the beaches, the piers, the outskirts, the poorer barrios, etc.).

So why do I do this odd and eccentric sweeping thing? Am I entering into early dementia, the old-man-yelling-at-cloud stage o’ Life?

 

The Why

 

Let me count the (many) reasons, in no particular order:

1. It is an act of love.
2. It is humbling.
3. I am obsessive when it comes to trash and this building is our home, so I like it neat. Yes, you could indeed say I suffer from a mild form of OCD.
4. Seeing trash on the ground is an insult to my hairy eyeballs. A massive insult, I tell you. Always has been. I hate seeing it.
5. Re point #4 above, I have Swiss-German blood flowing through my veins, so maybe my reaction is simply DNA/generational trauma.
6. It is almost certain that I have microplastics flowing through those same veins (as do you), and this is one way I can help reduce such earthly contamination (alas, by a mere .000000000000000000000000000001 %, ’tis true). 
7. The Butterfly Effect. Maybe if I start doing it, then other folks will follow along. Can you imagine what Barcelona–and indeed the world–would look like if we all joined the crusade!? (Yes, I feel a lot like The Star Thrower.)
8. I see it as a symbolic gesture that should be duplicated at the individual, neighborhood, city, country, corporate, and worldwide levels–a general “cleaning” of society in every sense of the word.
9. It is a passive-aggressive move to show passersby that it is not OK to let trash fall to the ground and, furthermore, it is more than OK to pick it up even if it isn’t yours. (For the same secret passive-aggressive reasons, I challenge myself to stoop down and pick up at least one piece of particularly egregious and insulting trash each time I sortie out into the bowels of Barcelona. I secretly want people to see me doing it. I get the idea that locals are trained from an early age not to touch things on the street. I’d like to change that attitude. See #7.)
10. It keeps our local gutters and drain grates clean so rain water doesn’t back up on the street.
11. It’s a way to stop just a tiny bit of trash from possibly ending up in the Mediterranean Sea or on its beaches.
12. It makes me feel good… so perhaps I’m racking up positive karma points?
13. It is a meditative exercise in many ways… those few minutes of sweeping and thinking random thoughts. Breathe, sweep, breathe, sweep, breathe, sweep…
14. It just might help the businesses on our ground floor attract customers–to the beauty products store, a mobile phone shop, the Tres Pollos roast chicken grill, and a haircutter.
15. It is a way to get to know the regulars around the neighborhood and feel the rythmn of the city.
16. People stop and ask me directions (“Where is the nearest Metro stop?”), thinking I must know the neighborhood, so I get to help folks and practice both my Catalan and Castellano.
17. Finally, I simply like admiring my work. Looking at the before and after of a job well done gives me a warm feeling in my tummy. (The elderly lady in the building next door who regularly walks her cute little dog seems to appreciate it as well: “Muy bien, joven, muy bien!”)

 

Questions I Ask Myself As I Sweep (and Weep?)

 

• Why do I even do this and how long can I keep it up?
• Will anyone even care when I eventually stop this community service? Should I even care?
• What do people think when they see an obvious gringo sweeping the sidewalk and picking up trash scraps? Do people notice I’m a fur-ah-ner?
• Why don’t more businesses, cafés, and bar-restaurants sweep up? I know I am certainly less inclined to enter an establishment with trashy sidewalks, especially eating locales with outside tables.
• Why do people walk through my little piles of leaves before I can scoop them up? What is going on in their lives that makes them so unaware of their surroundings? (Perhaps nothing, perhaps everything.)
• How is that cigarette butts (toxins!), along with their empty cardboard pack/plastic wrap, are not considered trash? Apparently it is ok to simply throw all that on the ground.
• How did folks in Barcelona get in the habit of throwing their trash at the base of the trees when no trash receptacle is handy? (See photo below.)
• Why are there no trash cans at bus stops? There should be extra large cans there, for sure.
• How much of what we put in those color-coded recycling bins is actually recycled? How much is simply bundled off to distant and poorer climes? (I will dutifully recycle, regardless–gotta keep the process lubricated.)
• Why doesn’t the city dedicate small teams of sweepers to patrol the main plazas to keep them spotless, a la Disneyland?
• How does some of this trash–wrappers, a kleenex, a plastic bottle or bag, a paper receipt, a flyer, a newspaper page, a banana peel–how and when does this detritus actually hit the sidewalk? I rarely see the actual causal act. Are people doing it unobtrusively out of shame?
• How do the city’s professional street cleaners feel about all the crap they see on a daily basis? Does it affect their opinion of us human beans?
• Who is the guy, or gal, who sucks on the exact same hard candies then leaves multiple plastic wrappers in the same general spot in the same gutter every damn day!?
• What is the backstory of the Nigerian man (real nice guy, working on getting his papers) who, early every morning, is always seated on a box on the corner silently pleading for food and/or money? What has he gone through to get here? 
• In the end, does any of this even matter? I’m thinking of geologic time here. Subduction of the tectonic plates and piping hot magma will eventually take care of all that plastic, old cars and trucks, the Pyramids and the Burj Khalifa–and homo ambitiosus sapiens. The Pachamama will then, inexorably and placidly and in her own special way, find a new equilibrium without all those billions of human beans around (until the next Earthly catastrophe requires yet another adjustment, of course).

 

A Final Microplastics Quote To Fire You Up

 

“Today microplastics are everywhere. In the oceans; in the air; in the food chains and in us. There is nowhere where they aren’t on this planet of ours and they even inhabit our blood streams.

Scary? It should be!

Because so much isn’t known about the long term effects of microplastics on living organisms and if they really pose a serious threat.

The companies that make the bottles and all the plastics know some of the answers, but if we want them to start telling the truth, then we will need to start asking more serious and searching questions before we all become a plastic society in a plastic world.”
― Anthony T. Hincks, American author