From the beginning of Tribe Series 1, we often saw the Mall Rats at meal times. Because of the scarcity and shortage of food and valuable nature of anything they could get their hands on there would’ve been very few food leftovers/scraps.
Patsy and Cloe are wandering the dirty streets with a bit of nature in their hands, they have found a cute lamb.
Later on when the Tribe became involved in the farm, any food scraps would’ve been used to feed the animals on the farm. At the same time, some of the food they had learnt to grow themselves so they would only be taking what they needed, instead of keeping a food stash as they had early on back at the mall.
People like Jack were very resourceful and somewhat innovative. He never liked to see anything go to waste, in an electrical sense anyway, and tried to recycle and reuse in any way he could for new innovations and machinery!
This creativity and invention was encouraged to utilise and recycle old goods, especially when the likes of The Tribal Gathering took place. By creating something useful that noone else had access to, would give the Mall Rats a ‘power’ over other Tribes. Jack therefore continued work on his power generator to get it up and running for show at the Gathering.
Where does the Garbage go?
The streets were littered with rubbish and different bits and pieces of items from around the city. The outside of the mall was never cleaned up and always had an old trolley and fires burning as a result of the shop looters and different people trying to survive and keep warm.
When the virus first struck, streets were littered with rubbish and burning car hulks as people looted shops and cars.
Of course back in the days when adults were around there would’ve been a special Garbage disposal service in order to keep streets and houses free from all their rubbish. But what would the people do in Tribeworld without this service? The streets were becoming more and more cluttered with unuseable junk, old cars rusting away, trollies, and general garbage.
Catch the mess on the streets here, just as they are trying to clean it all up!
Scrap Metal Yards
Later in series three old metal yards were utilised as secluded meeting places for the likes of Lex and May.
Gas/Petrol
Where did it come from and what further damage could it do? Initially there was no petrol supply. Zoot and the Locos had found enough gas to run their Police car and had managed to maintain enough stock of fuel to keep it running for a long time.
Often if the Tribes found vehicles there was enough gas in the tanks to run them ie the Bus to take the Mall Rats to Eagle Mountain, sand buggy used by Lex and Bray to escape the Chosen.
It was later found out that the evil ‘Chosen’ had been stockpiling fuel, which of course they had utilized whilst driving around kidnapping the kids in their intimidating black Chosen Van. Luckily, Bray, Lex and Ebony were on to this and became “Chosen” in order to destroy this form of Power leading to Chaos in their world. They had a master plan which ultimately lead to a huge explosion, destroying the fuel in a puff of smoke!
On a more positive note…
A good thing about the fuel supply generally running dry in most other areas meant that the Sectors of the city would become a lot more environmentally friendly without gas pollution from car and machinery exhausts.
So what was ever done about the rubbish and pollution problem?
Since the different Tribes never lived in harmony there was little hope of such a standardized service to make their living environment better.
But there was a mission to make these streets tidy? Bray and the Mall Rats made an attempt to tidy the streets by getting everyone to participate and giving them all a job. There were people tidying the mall, people sweeping the streets, clearing the rubbish etc. Sector 10 was having a makeover.
Bray is on his mission of cleaning the streets.
So all in all Tribeworld initially a polluted place where no-one had the time or even thought about the necessity of clearing and cleaning all the rubbish.
Of course as the typically responsible Tribe members got settled into life without adults and became used to rules and the general way of life, they found that cleanliness and taking pride in how and where they lived was a necessary part of life and needed to be taken care of just as it was before the virus.