By Richard Dablah
What happens when memory itself becomes disposable—when the rituals of trade,
the logic of thrift, and the art of reuse are discarded like torn wrappers? When ways
of knowing—how to measure, conserve, carry, and return—are swept away by the
glitter of plastic and the grammar of convenience?
This is not a story that ends cleanly. It is not nostalgia. It is a reckoning. A
return—not to what was, but to what was understood.
I remember standing on tiptoe in the Mauritanian boutique, Abidjan, 1980s. The
scent of kerosene mingled with dust and baguettes. The boutique, a lean structure of
wood and tin beneath a faded Coca-Cola sign, stood like a threshold between
scarcity and ingenuity. Oil wasn’t handed over in sealed sachets or branded
containers. It was measured—poured into whatever vessel you brought: a Fanta
bottle, a palm wine jug, a reused tin once filled with milk. Packaging was not design;
it was memory.
There was something dignified in that transaction. The shopkeeper didn’t recite
ingredients or push lifestyle choices. He didn’t sell; he served. Oil, like trust, was
transferred carefully—without barcodes, branding, or boast. Its value lay not in
appearance, but in relationship. You paid for what you needed, not what you could
be made to want.
This was not destitution in disguise. It was a functioning, self-taught circularity—an
economy rooted in return, in adaptation, in waste-avoidance as wisdom. No one
called it “sustainable.” It simply was.
Later, in Ghana, the same ethos echoed across Makola, Kaneshie, Madina. Markets
weren’t just points of exchange—they were ecologies of survival. Bar soap cut with
kitchen knives. Tomatoes wrapped in folded leaves. Gari cradled in re-used
newspaper. Kerosene trickled into empty gin bottles. Akpeteshie in old Guinness.
Everywhere, improvisation substituted for packaging; scarcity cultivated
resourcefulness.
The logic of these systems was not written, but lived. Passed on through gestures
and routines. It was a knowledge not measured by carbon footprints, but by how
little was left behind.
You saw it most vividly in the ritual of waakye. In the 1990s, waakye was hot,
fragrant, and lovingly wrapped in leaves—carried home in bowls and basins, cradled
with care. There was no litter, only lineage. You brought your own vessel, and with it,
a part of your household. To eat was to be present—to know the woman who served
you, to wait, to return, to reuse.
Then came the styrofoam. It arrived not with noise, but with promise: hygiene,
portability, class. But it was severance in disguise. It turned a shared act into a sealed
one. It erased the touch, the voice, the ritual. What remained was a husk—light,
lifeless, and enduring far beyond the meal. It claimed modernity but delivered
separation.
And then, the sachet.
It did not force its way in. It slid into the narrative with the elegance of equity.
“Democratised consumption,” they said. Now, a worker could afford shampoo. A
schoolchild could drink milk. A widow could buy oil by the spoonful. Scarcity, broken
into sachets, became a kind of freedom.
But mercy, when mechanised, can become menace.
Today, our drains are swollen with that promise. Our rivers are salted with residue.
The very groups sachets aimed to uplift now bear the heaviest cost—paying more
per unit, shouldering the consequence of convenience. Buying in bits becomes,
paradoxically, the most expensive way to live.
And yet, this isn’t a parable of good versus evil. The sachet filled a real void. It
stepped in where infrastructure failed, where trust in refilling systems collapsed,
where food safety was uncertain. It was a solution—but it calcified into dogma. It
monetised lack. It packaged need. It normalized the unreturnable.
Now our cities overflow not from abundance but from fragments. Empty things. Fast
things. Things that do not return.
Ghana’s Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) legislation signals a shift. It
whispers a truth long buried: that what is wrapped cannot be forgotten, that
convenience must be counted, that residue has lineage. It is a move not only toward
accountability, but toward memory.
But even the best law, if unanchored, will falter.
Before there were conferences on circularity, there were households that never
threw away a tin. Plastic bags were washed and pegged to dry. Cocoa tins became
sugar bowls. Omo boxes became pencil cases. Refuse was not rubbish until every use
was wrung out of it. There was no campaign. There was only necessity, shaped into
custom.
Let us not romanticise poverty. Let us not mistake survival for sufficiency. But let us
remember: circularity was not born in Geneva or Stockholm. It lived—and still
lives—in the architecture of everyday wisdom.
The EPR law must not merely count plastics. It must confront the logic of packaging.
It must reimagine markets with bulk dispensers and refill stations. It must uplift
informal waste workers as the ecological stewards they have always been. It must
restore dignity not through charity, but through systemic respect.
This is not just policy. It is ethical excavation.
Because the real question is not how we deal with waste. It is how we remember the
knowledge we buried. The practices we dismissed. The systems we dismantled in
our hunger for speed.
Let the law remember the disappearing tin.
Let it remember the Fanta bottle made to hold palm oil.
Let it remember that waste once had a rhythm, and memory a container.
We do not need to invent a future.
We only need to return to a past we never fully understood—with grief, with
humility, and with eyes open to what we’ve thrown away.
The Disappearing Tin: A Meditation on Memory, Waste, and the False Modernity of Convenience
