Water cleanses. It flows. It moves things along. Therefore it is the perfect place to dispose of garbage.
I love catching bad behaviour on video. This post includes not only this beautiful shot on the right of how you can effectively dispose of your bags of trash via your local waterways, but I’ve got a great video taken within the last half hour of a dumping of styrofoam into the creek just outside my bedroom window.
Also, check out a previous post (Community Garden – Community Dump), which details a community garden in rural China that, as the name suggests, doubles as a community dumping ground. For convenience, I’m including the bizarre, but classic, video footage of the garden below. I had intended just to film the garden, but a dumping of broken glass began just as I started filming and formed a strange ‘soundtrack’.
As I watched the second video I was taken by how unabashedly she was dumping. You were filming, it looks at least, not far from her at all and she just kept right on going. Is it culturally acceptable in China to just dispose of stuff wherever you feel like it? What is garbage service like there anyway? We have curb service twice a week here, is that unheard of in China? Inquiring minds want to know. And lastly, one of my biggest pet peeves is people who throw your garbage out their car window. Food wrappers, bags, bottles, cigarette buds, really, are you 1? Do they think once out of your sight the stuff vanishes? I can’t tell you the number of times while sitting at a red light when this has happened, how I have sat there and imagined getting out of my car, picking up the McDonald’s bag, knocking on their window and innocently saying, “Excuse me, it appears you have dropped this.” I don’t do it though, honestly, out of fear for my safety.
There isn’t a ‘no littering’ mentality here. Things are a little better in the larger, more modern cities, but it is an absolute free-for-all in the countryside where I was living and shooting that vid. Litter of all sorts, including food remnants and containers, are dropped on the ground as one walks, without a second thought. For that matter, snot is usually blown from the nose onto the ground, thick gobs of phlegm are horked onto the floor inside buildings (I have to be careful walking down stairs so that I don’t slip on gobs of spittle everywhere). In the countryside, parents often let their kids poop on the sidewalks, sometimes right outside open air restaurants. People pee in public everywhere (more often men and children, but I did catch a woman in a dress in a ritzy area in broad daylight drop her panties and her body for a pee on the sidewalk in my neighbourhood a few years ago.)
Haha, I have actually returned someone’s litter to them once or twice back home in safer settings. I agree though, calling someone on their garbage problem isn’t worth it – you’re dealing with someone who is ignorant to begin with, and you can’t argue with ignorance.
Interesting story – I once briefly (and surprisingly) dated a smoker years ago. He would drop his butts on the ground, but he had a habit of picking up discarded newspapers from the ground and putting them in the trash. It was weird and I called him on his littering. He truly didn’t see the butts as litter. I don’t get people and the way they rationalize things sometimes.
So different from Japan, where after 5 days of blowing my nose in public (in a tissue, not onto the floor!) my husband informed me that the Japanese consider blowing your nose in public is rude!
I shake my head at the trash we produce, yet I feel I can’t say much as I am a reluctant participant. Every time I finish something and throw it away I wish there was a way I could refill the container I already have rather than purchase a new one just like it. But I can’t because my society is not organized like that. It’s sad really.
Yes, unfortunately, the solutions to dealing with waste mostly end up being inconvenient, costly, or inconceivable to current society
I think any good solution is going to have to come not from a modification of existing ways of doing things, but from a complete redesign and shift in perspective and priorities. Ain’t gonna happen any time soon.
It is so hard to witness such casual disregard for the sacredness of creation.
I completely agree. Nature is bigger than all of us, and we humans are the only animal bent on its destruction…
Cleaning stuff is hard, says the lady with the plastic bottle full of stuff.
Stuff: the greatest human invention!
Cheer up, GV. They’ll either throw you out for spreading lies, or your term will be up and you can go live somewhere else.
Speaking of spreading lies, I always find it fascinating when a casual conversation with a local somehow ends with them telling me how Western governments and media lie about China.
Yes, I know that we Westerners are only tolerated here as long as we stick to entertaining.
Great story and video.
I’ve had the luxury of living a few places around the world and it seems to me an exception when a country has a no littering mentality. South American countries as a whole litter (and do all the other stuff you described happening in China!) a’plenty. I honestly think many cultures see it as a way to employ immigrant populations to clean up after them. Italy too. But not the Swiss! I lived in the Canton of Vaud for three years and god forbid you toss a thing anywhere at any time. Or do anything for that matter.
I once got into an argument with a woman where I live in New York who “dropped” a bag of fruit peels when she got out of her car. Affluent neighborhood. She was dressed well. But the mouth on her when I said something – yowsa. Today it’s hard to know when to say something and when to keep your mouth shut for fear of some crazy retaliating.
Ha! Yes, within schools in China, the students are used as forced clean-up labour assisting the full-time cleaners. Often they cloak the work as “volunteer work”. Unfortunately, it doesn’t translate into a learning experience for littering. It also doesn’t inspire thinking about the environment as a whole…
I find a lot of the human behaviours that disappoint me are the rule rather than the exception. I suppose education (which in most places isn’t happening on a wide scale or in an organized way) is a very slow process.
Interesting and scary experience you had with that woman! I’m surprised she didn’t sic a rabid pocket poodle on you!
Agree about “volunteer work” or even immigrant labor force doing the cleaning up not translating into a learning experience. Very well said. Education being a slow process is often at odds with what that culture deems acceptable behavior. Hence, some countries will always see litter as okay. [in my humble opinion]
Here’s my old blog post about the fruit mess. It got my readers laughing pretty hard.
http://earthoceanskyredux.com/2012/05/25/im-no-second-banana/
“You’ll eat these peas, and you’ll like them, dammit!”
Force feeding doesn’t work…
So here I am with a compost pile and always trying to find a place to recycle my odd numbered plastic containers, used motor oil, and those new fluorescent bulbs. I’m not going to stop doing that, but I wonder if it makes a difference in the ‘big picture’, have to start somewhere I guess.
Yes, great question. Like voting, opposing human rights abuses, etc. Can one person make a difference?
I usually think that it really doesn’t matter what I do in the grand scheme of things. I’m kind of a nihilist at heart. So, it comes down to this: I do what I do so that I can sleep at night. If I help someone or something in addition, it’s cake
My god the second video especially left me speechless. I cannot imagine someone getting away with dumping glass in North America, and she was dumping right by the road and into a community garden. Sheesh! Great post Tara!
I will say that this country is always an eye-opener for me… And it gives me a never-ending supply of material to write about and photograph…
Wow. The damage they are doing to their water and their land is huge. While I can’t say I’m surprised, I can say that I haven’t seen a video quite like this before– dump/garden? Interestingly, as a government employee, I know of dumping done in sensitive areas by people of certain other countries… It upsets me because many of us work so hard to ensure that we have a clean environment and others just throw trash around as they see fit.
And when I multiply these small doings by 1.3 billion (minus a few who belong to Greenpeace China and a few who are just plain ole nature-lovers) in this country alone, it makes me very, very sad.
Like with all major problems, it often seems it is a few fighting the effects of the many…