Call me Emmanuel Sherlock Dangata
What’s the most interesting problem you’ve solved?
I can’t say for sure but this is a candidate:
A few years ago, I stepped out to buy something close to the house and noticed someone had dumped trash beside our fence.
I was furious!
There was a neighbourhood dumpsite just a few hundred meters away. It didn’t make sense that anyone would be unreasonable enough to dump their trash beside our house when they could just take it there.
I collected as much of the trash as I could and put it inside our trash bag so we could have it transported to the neighbourhood bola.
For the next few weeks, this pattern continued — we would wake up to find trash at the same spot and be forced to deal with it.
To make matters worse, the owner of the plot of land next to ours (where this heartless person had turned into a dump site) assumed we were responsible.
I was desperate to catch the jerk.
I considered all sorts of crazy ideas like staying up all night, awake and outside by the fence for an entire week till I caught the monkey, or paying Gomzy to invent a device with a sensor that would sound an alarm whenever anyone passed.
But these solutions seemed far harder than just dealing with the trash every few days a week, so I adopted a different approach. I started studying the trash!
A few days later, just by studying the trash, I had created a profile of the UNSUB detailed enough that as soon as I told my mum she instantly ID’d someone who perfectly fit the profile.
I noticed the trash consistently had some spent zobo (roselle) leaves and multiple empty margarine and jolly juice sachets. Based on this, I inferred that the person whose trash was in our backyard was someone who made zobo and chin-chin in commercial quantities.
Best piece of detective work I ever did! 😎
Thinking about this years later, I realise that our waste can contain an insane amount of information about us — our habits, health, spending habits and even our love lives.
Our waste is such a massive reservoir of information that it is usually the first port of call for forensic investigators. The number of criminals that are in jail because of something investigators found in their trash is insane.
Beyond being a rich source of information about an individual or household, waste can help make crucial and precise inferences about entire communities. This has birthed fields like wastewater epidemiology.
By studying samples of wastewater from city sewers, scientists have been able to monitor the prevalence of opioid drug use and predict outbreaks and surges of COVID cases faster than other means.
My detective experience highlights the importance of being mindful of our waste footprint and the potential it holds for understanding ourselves and our surroundings better. It also serves as a reminder that sometimes, the most intriguing puzzles can be solved by paying close attention to the seemingly mundane details that often go unnoticed.