I live in
what I call “an expensive neighborhood”. Homes here start at about 200,000 euro
and get more expensive. I live in one of the “cheap seats” – a rental property
(we won’t discuss the rent, but it ain’t “cheap”). Well I have a complaint:
Rubbish! Rubbish in the form of candy wrappers, bottles (both plastic and glass),
empty chips bags…
Sorry, it
makes me furious almost to frothing. Every day on almost every walk with Nazar
I pick up some rubbish and put it in the trash cans that are available. I’m
tempted to carry a big trash bag with me an tote it in daily to the city administration
and ask what they can do about this trash.
Metal
bottle caps litter the beach where children are meant to run around barefoot
playing in the sand. Yet parents take
their tots there and presumably there aren’t
too many gashed feet at the emergency room.
Glass
bottles at the beach, on the football field, and the sidewalks. Some intact,
waiting to be picked up and “redeemed” for recycling, but others smashed,
waiting for feet, paws, bike tires and just the right moment to end a happy
outing.
Plastic
bottles, can also be redeemed. Why should the lawn mowers or snow plows
(depending on the season) have to smash them to pieces? What is going to come
of those pieces? Yes, they will break down further to nice inorganic plastic
sand, and stay there for 10,000 years. Why should I care! I won’t make it even
a hundred years from now.
Plastic
candy wrappers, plastic ice cream wrappers, plastic cups, plastic bottle caps,
plastic bags. Enough already! Plastic is from OIL. Oil is expensive. How can it
possibly be retrieved, recycled and possibly put to better use. Why should all
this plastic have to litter the ground? Why are manufacturers of all these
products using it? Why aren’t we all boycotting them, writing letters demanding
a move away from plastic?
Parents
have not trained their kids properly and thoroughly. I bet than in any of the
pricy homes no one deposits rubbish willy nilly on the floor, sofa and wherever. Why the heck can’t everyone consider the long
term and what this pricey neighborhood will look like after I’m long dead? Do
they WANT the value of the posh neighborhood to dwindle to just a dismal
garbage dump? No more of this “they’re just kids” or “you only live once!” We
live everyday till our own end! We are all responsible for this. It might be great
to have a nice swank home in a posh section of garbage-hill town! But the
neighborhood won’t stay posh – in fact a lot of the time it looks pretty seedy
already. Don’t people SEE that? Teach by example: pick up the trash even if it
isn’t yours!
I won’t go
on (much) about dog poo – but I could. It is at least organic. But just little
over 100 years ago people were “waking up” to the need for sanitation and public
hygiene – no more open sewers which clearly bred diseases like typhoid, which spread
rapidly in the unhygienic conditions. So WHY do people, who presumably KNOW
this, leave dog poo behind? Because they were on their cell phone? Because they
didn’t have a bag with them to pick it up? Because it “stinks”? Because they
are lazy? Because they don’t care if others get sick?