Recycling, The Libyan way.

Recycling, The Libyan way.

As the rest of the world struggled in their attempts to adopt the recycling life style, we Libyans as a nation have been recycling without knowing it for centuries. For instance only very recently have Libyans had the convenience of plastic bags, Since forever Libyan household have had a Guffa or Alaga depending on what your family calls it. It’s a flexible basket woven from the leaves of the date palms that grow in abundance all over Libya. These have been, and still are, the carrier bag of choice for most Libyans especially for food stuffs. Unfortunately in the very short time that plastic bags have been in use they have done extensive damage as you see them strewn all over the country and they are the very worst of waste because they are impossible to recycle and once in the earth they will take a thousand years to decay.

In other countries you would see pieces of furniture or carpets left on the street for the Garbage collection not in Libya a piece of furniture is kept forever its repaired when broken,upholstered if flattened with use and given a face lift every few years as it fades, as for carpets they also are kept until they are worn out from use ,they are washed regularly in gardens or on roof tops(an extremely laborious back breaking ritual only practiced by Libyan women) hung on walls and beaten with sticks if dusty . Even as the carpets wear out, they are not let go but cut into bits and pieces to be used as doormats or taken to sit on when sitting out in the garden or if going out on a picnic.

That is how Libyans treat their furnishings ,so you can imagine the rarity of electrical appliances being thrown out .Electrical goods are repaired repeatedly, until all hope is lost of it ever working again and then it’s either retained for spare parts if the same make is to be purchased again or donated to a relative with a dodgy appliance.

So it came as no great surprise to the Libyans to see the freedom fighters recycling old rifles and airplane mounted weapons into weapons to use to push Gaddafi forces out of their towns, when the world refused to sell them weapons to defend themselves.

We saw Misrata warriors reinforce their old pickup trucks with sheets of steel (which they were very handy with due the presence of the steel factory in their city) and mount them with guns salvaged from old airplanes to make armored vehicles.

That’s the spirit of Libya, which the whole worlds admired making something out of nothing, though Libyans dislike the color green due to it being shoved in their faces for so long as a symbol of Gaddafi’s dominance I can truly say that Libyans have been green from a recycling point of view even before the recycling concept was ever invented.