- Americans discard 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour.
- Every hour British households throw away enough rubbish to fill the Royal Albert Hall.
- China produces and discards 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks a year and cuts down 25 million trees to do it.
- In the Bangladeshi Capital Dhaka, more than 10 million plastic bags are dumped everyday.
- A landfill closes in the US everyday, there’s only 18 years of landfill capacity left.
When I first moved to Thailand I was surprised at the apparent lack of recycling. No obvious glass/paper/plastic banks, no media campaigns to encourage recycling. Apparently the government did introduce schemes involving color-coded street bins but this failed due to the lack of enforcement and the changing of bin colors.
However, there are two types of people who are making a small difference, they do it primarily for financial reasons and are looked down on by Thai society. Firstly, there is khon kep kaya, they’re the ladies and gentlemen you see searching through the rubbish for anything they can sell to be recycled. Secondly, saleng, (a Chinese word that translates something like ‘rag and bone man’) they buy people’s unwanted items, usually ride pedal powered tricycles and can make up to 1000 Baht a day; 4-5 baht profit per kilo on recyclable stuff, plus extra cash from selling on stuff they repair.
Thailand produces 14.2 million tonnes of industrial and consumer waste a year according to World Bank figures in 2003 and reprocesses 11% of a possible 4.5 million tonnes. Without the saleng, the state recycles just 3%, compared to rates of 30-50% in Korea, Singapore and Japan.
(Source: ‘Very Thai, Everyday Popular Culture’ by Philip Cornwell-Smith). What got me thinking about this? Well, it was the huge pile of drinking straws sitting on top of my fridge that I’ll never use - none of which I ever asked for, but never declined either. It is elaborate over-packaging that is mostly to blame for, which retail writer Anon Nakornthab sums up as ‘buys ten buns, get eleven bags’. Thailand’s 7 –Eleven boss reckons it’ll take years for Thais to accept the question ‘would you like a bag with that?’ - poor excuse if you ask me.
So what can we do? I now make a point of telling convenience store staff I don’t want a straw and I’m going to start taking my own bag to put my stuff in. I’m also trying to separate my glass/plastic/paper etc. so the khon kep kaya don’t have to trawl through my half-eaten noodles and used cat litter to get at anything worth selling.
What’s your take on the recycling issue here in Thailand/Hua Hin? Do you have any bright ideas about how we can reduce the excessive amount of waste that it being produced? I’m sure that if we all did just a little, we could make a dent in those worrying figures above.
Again, not sanitary or practical. I could also burn them I guess but the plastic burning may do as much harm as landfill and, my neighbors would probably shoot me.
