I have always known that I have a lot to learn about conservation. I knew this because I watched my grandmother, a WWII bride, and how she conserved things.
Living here has been a new experience in not being wasteful.
Conserving water, shorter showers, less wasted water while brushing teeth. Different families take different measures. Using dish water to water plants, fill toilets etc.
It's interesting that in a place where it rains so much you conserve water, but the reason you do is because you can only store so much of it at any one time.
But the one that our Haus Meri taught us was washing zip lock bags. Sure we re-use them but I hadn't realized we could wash them too.
One wonderful thing about PNG culture is that they are not very wasteful of items. They will go through your rubbish and pull out items that are useful to them. It is humbling when you have someone say "don't throw that away, I can make a bilum out of that."
I have found that living here we are much less wasteful, in that we do not produce as much garbage. There aren't many pre-packaged meals or foods here so that is a lot less boxes and bags in the trash. We re-use all plastic containers... for ice tea, kerosene, whatever it is.
Whatever is paper is burned, so there is only the wet garbage left. We compost for the garden, so that leaves only certain items. I'd say what we put out each week is about 1/4 or less of what we put out in the States each week.
It's interesting the tricks you learn by living amongst seasoned pro's at conservation!
