A rubbish blog

Cambodia is a beautiful country. The streets of every village are lined with houses on stilts, smiling people, busy cycles and motos. But they are also strewn with litter.

Take the example of eating in a Cambodian food shack. It’s not the most pleasurable experience at the best of times, with questionable hygiene, ubiquitous stinky fish-sauce, mindnumbing telly soaps and soulless red plastic chairs. But perhaps the worst part is that everyone just chucks their garbage on the floor – paper towels, beer cans, bones. And of course this means dogs, cats and worse constantly prowl for castoffs. Altogether, only for those with strong stomachs.

In Kratie I witnessed people throwing their rubbish into the Mekong river. With so many Cambodians living by the water, it must be tempting to toss away garbage, which is conveniently swept away. It’s hard to explain why this is a bad thing, as any downstream consequences are far out of sight and mind. Perhaps we will only learn when we suffer from other polluters upstream. For example, Kratie’s famous Irrawaddy dolphins may all be dead in a decade, allegedly due to chemicals from non-organic farming practices further up in fast-industrialising China.

The worst offender is the malevolent plastic bag. Buy anything here – an onion from the chatty market lady, a drink from the toothless old coffeeman, a packet of noodles which is already double wrapped – and it is automatically presented to you in polythene. And just as unthinkingly as they are given, the evil wrappings are tossed on the ground, where they are left to rot.

Which of course is the problem. Back in the days when all waste was organic, it probably wasn’t so bad to drop the odd paper bag or banana skin, as they would quickly decompose. But the plastic doesn’t rot, it just piles up higher and higher. Education and habits have simply failed to keep pace with developments in product wrappings.

But hang on a minute! What, actually, is the problem with litter?

For a start, isn’t rubbish a health hazard? Piles of rotting garbage must attract rats and their associated diseases. But I’m not so sure – the rotting stuff doesn’t seem to be the problem, rather the stuff which doesn’t rot. I’ve also heard that discarded bags and bottles store small pools of water, ideal breading grounds for malevolent mosquitoes. But again I’m unconvinced: certainly in my village, there are pools of water everywhere, due mainly to the lack of proper drainage – the water trapped in plastic wrappings is a drop in the ocean.

How about health hazards to children or animals? But again it doesn’t seem a particularly powerful argument. The odd child may suffocate on a plastic bag, but it simply doesn’t feature as a major hazard in comparison with the many dangers for kids trying to survive in a developing country. And animals – well frankly, forget about karma and caring buddhist nature-lovers, nobody I’ve met here really cares about animals – at best they are ignored, at worst tortured or eaten. If the odd bird chokes on a piece of discarded plastic, who cares?

What about the danger to drainage systems from discarded plastic bags? Well, I’m sure it’s true that part of the threat from these environmental enemies is that they block drains and cause terrible flooding. But again it doesn’t quite hold, in my village at least – the recent floods (the worst in living memory) can’t really be blamed on plastic blocking the sewers, because there isn’t basic drainage here to be blocked!

Surely, as least, everyone will agree that litter is unpleasant and unsightly? But actually I’m not even sure about that. It certainly spoils much of the beautiful Cambodian landscape for me, but many local people just don’t seem to notice it. Worryingly, even I seem to be getting used to it. Even if I do find it aesthetically damaging, this just my subjective view, which others could easily disagree with. Basically, if Cambodians don’t mind, what does it matter if I do? – it’s their country. Is the tourist dollar the only incentive to keep a country beatiful? Is aesthetics really the only vaguely compelling reason we have not to litter our landscape?

There is hope. For one, Cambodian culture places a strong value on the beautiful (‘sa-aat’). When passing a football pitch in my local town I recently saw a group of young volunteers cleaning up the usual debris. And when I helped organise a further clean up, the only explanation required was that we wanted to help make it ‘sa-aat’. Many Cambodians keep their own houses and possessions spotlessly clean already, and temples are also litter-free – so it can be done.

Also, there is already a strong recycling culture here, albeit economically rather than environmentally driven. The honk of the plastic bottle recycling cart is often heard in Cambodian towns, and bicycles laden high with flattened cardboard boxes are a familiar sight. For my own part, I hope that the new vegetable garden at my hospital will include a composting area to encourage reuse of organic waste.

So whilst some say that beautiful Cambodia will always be blighted by litter, I hope soon we will see that’s a load of rubbish.