on restafval, recycling, and life remade

'one man's trash is another man's dining room table'

In the Netherlands, waste is kept underground. Whether it’s an inheritance of our Germanic neighbours’ notorious efficiency, or a reflection of kitsch, (“the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word” - Milan Kundera), rubbish is supposed to be stored far, far away.

We don’t tend to think of life under the surface. Beneath us is where we send the purposeless, the broken, the inefficient. Below the earth is stored that which has been condemned to decay. The dead, the dying, the destitute: these are the currency of the underground, and that which we prefer to pretend didn’t exist.

Once a week (or every morning, depending on how busy your neighbourhood is), Amsterdam’s grey WALL-E-esque restafval repositories are lifted into the sky by a sirening collection truck, revealing their twelve-foot underbelly of encapsulated garbage. The first time you see this procedure, it’s quite the wonder to behold. The bins are emptied, the rubbish is cleared: recycling and waste go to their new respective Hades. And yet, on the surface, often cluttering up the sidewalk, much that has been discarded remains.

The Dutch are notoriously frugal people. Money doesn’t flow: it is managed. A broodje kaas wrapped in (reused) tinfoil is the lunch du jour of any workday, school lunch, or car trip. Yogurt cartons are scraped for the last drop, Marktplaats is awash with the previously used, and AH’s bonus cards are more closely affixed to the average person here than a crucifix.

Which is to say, while rubbish may be hidden underground, it is considered akin to a sin to let things go to waste. (Relatedly, the Dutch word for ‘debt’ (schuld) also means ‘guilt’). This is why random piles of dismantled flat-packs, old lamps, and haunted-looking paintings frequently appear on the pavement beside the grey street bins. It is waste intended to not go to waste: one man’s rubbish left to be reused, and turned into another man’s treasure.

While leaving old items out on the street happens in most places (my childhood was punctuated with the sounds of the rag’n’bone man driving around town in his white transit van, calling out “anyscrapmetaaaal” for all the neighbours to hear), the frequency of it here makes it feel like a particularly Dutch thing. It’s so common in Amsterdam that Instagram accounts have been made to track particularly profitable piles of junk: @stoopingmap posts multiple times a day, in an attempt to reduce waste and help others furnish their homes. It's a form of generous frugality, or frugal generosity.

Living on a busy street with bins in front of our front door, I regularly see neighbours and passersby riffling through the daily pile of discarded stuff, hoping to find something they could use or sell, something to be up-cycled or deconstructed. Just because something may be no longer wanted doesn't mean it's not wanted at all. Someone else might find use in another person’s uselessness. That which is broken can be fixed by a more patient hand, that which is old can be re-mended.

Since moving to Amsterdam, plenty of ‘rubbish’ has found its way into my various flats. The chair I would sit on to write; the bench used as a record-player stand; the vase that held the flowers I was sent when I was sick. In reclamation we give new life, and through use we give new purpose.

After years of chronic illness and pain, recurrent flare-ups and frequent GP appointments, a few months ago I was rushed into emergency surgery, where it was discovered that I’ve been living with acute appendicitis, apparently for years. An organ decayed and my body built around it, shielding my bloodstream from the infection that was continuously raging inside me, like a tire fire burning for decades.

Unable to get rid of the inflammation without medical intervention, my body intervened itself. I’ve been sick, and getting sicker, yet it’s a wonder I didn’t die of sepsis way back when I first started to experience symptoms. I was gaslighted by multiple doctors, telling me that my atypical abdominal pain was gynaecological – I’m a woman, so naturally, what else could it be? – rather than, from their perspective, medical.

As it turns out, I had a rare, severe form of appendicitis which only affects 0.02% of patients, and which most of my doctors had never encountered before. (“Look at me Mom, I’m a medical marvel!”) There’s been just two medical papers published online about it, and I’m facing many more months of hospital tests to try and get to the root of things. This is to say, my experience of the Dutch medical system has been extremely kitsch: by which I mean, doctors here seem extremely reluctant to concede that shit, aka. sickness, exists. I had an organ necrotising inside of me for “months, probably years,” and yet my GP repeatedly sent me home with a five-day prescription for antibiotics, the advice to wait and see, and, you guessed it, a recommendation to take paracetamol.

Here, to be sick is as if to be in debt: it is a shameful thing, a result of poor management and personal neglect. If symptoms cannot be easily and swiftly identified and rectified (repurposed into something useful), then illness is treated as garbage: something to be pushed underground, its treatment associated with high taxes and many leaflets.

It feels somewhat gauche to write so openly about a medical condition. Like politics and religion, one should not talk about a doctor’s visit around the dinner table. But, as Virginia Woolf wrote in On Being Ill, ‘illness is a part of every human being’s experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.’

Writing about illness is a protest against kitsch: it is a refusal to conceal the painful, and often unattractive, truth of what it means to live in a fallible body and/or mind. Susan Sontag famously argued against the metaphorization of illness (despite utilising metaphors in her own writing about it), forcing us to instead take a frank look at the land of the ill, in all its rough and rawness. For, she wrote, ‘illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.’

Perhaps experiencing illness, and its effect on the perception of my own corporeality, is why I write. Illness often causes you to be overlooked, or discarded. Being chronically ill means learning the art of concealment, denying to others, and yourself, the true extent of your pain. You put a brave face on, trying to protect others from the discomfort of witnessing your discomfort, your diseased body a horrific testament to the fact that all of our bodies may be liable to sickness and disability at any moment. Although material wealth can provide greater protections and potential treatment, none of us are immune to becoming citizens of the kingdom of the sick.

Both the wellness industry and our hyper-consumerist culture, which prioritises a cycle of purchasing and discarding rather than reusing and repurposing (and which itself is tightly linked to the fitness and wellness industries), are built on a foundation of kitsch. Returning to Kundera: ‘Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.’ We want to be seen to have the newest and the ‘best’; to be polished, superior, invulnerable. We try desperately to hide our aging, our sickness, our shit. We do not want to disappear, and so we buy, buy, buy. Perhaps it’s a fear of death which drives us to so consume.

Seeing rubbish on our streets is confronting, showing just how much we waste, the limits of our appreciation, and the ease at which we both discard and are discarded. We all have different perceptions of utility, and often when a shine starts to fade, the new comes in as replacement.

Had I not spent the last three, or potentially four, years of my life with as-then unexplained pain and sickness, many things would probably have been different. This would likely not be my first post in over a year, and I would perhaps be further on in my job and career. But like scraps on the street, life gets remade. I am well now, although I do not know how long I will remain so, or why I got so sick. I will forever hold dual citizenship. But knowing this, and having lived amongst both the dawn and twilight, drives a new refusal to concede to kitsch, or to over-consume.

I find both a need and joy in repurposing, just as I do a purpose to write. Sometimes inspiration comes in the form of a near-death experience, and sometimes in arrives as flowers placed in a vase, which was once found on the street.