4 ms·

This is just using being "poor" to make excuses for bad behaviors. It's such a common occurrence in the West that people don't even think whether it is valid or

This is just using being "poor" to make excuses for bad behaviors. It's such a common occurrence in the West that people don't even think whether it is valid or not. It doesn't take copious amounts of money to not litter. It's an attitude. When I visited Vietnam my local friends kept their homes spotless, but when we were in hotels they would literally drop trash on the floor of the room even though there was a waste basket less than a meter away.Poor people don't need to litter to survive and prosper. Good waste management/sanitation habits improves lives in plenty of ways and it doesn't require wealth do to it.. It's attitudinal, not a matter of survival.

c22 8y ago
You have to be able to afford to buy trash bags if you want to keep your trash from being in "a pile" and then what do you do with all these bags of trash? If your whole community is too poor to afford a garbage truck then who is coming 'round to pick up the garbage? Of course poor people in underserved communities could just haul their own trash to the "local pile", but who has time to do that when you're working to get food on the table?
- wang_li 8y ago
  Your post to me is quite strange because it describes a problem that has a certain floor on poverty, but then claims those being spoken about live below that floor. If you have plastic bottles, cans, and etc. you are not so poor as to be unable to manage your waste. The hyper impoverished people you describe, subsistence farmers, have compost, not non-biodegradable and unburnable waste.
  - c22 8y ago
    I've never been to Vietnam and I wasn't attempting to describe any specific people. I was just addressing the idea that being poor is not a condition that might raise the bar for disposing of one's trash "properly" (or, for that matter, doing almost anything else). Where I live I spend $52 a month to have my trash picked up (and it just went up to $54). I can totally imagine a person or family who can afford to buy some things made of plastic (pretty much one of the cheapest materials in the world) but who would still be strained by an extra $50 obligation. Or people who can afford plastic but still live in a community that cannot afford to offer this service. I've seen photos of people living in mud and straw huts without windows or running water wearing Nikes so I suspect access to industrialized waste might be more accessible than you think. And I'm not saying even the poorest individual can't handle their own waste, I'm just positing that the effort required to do so is inversely correlated with income. If anything I'd prefer if people were more careless with their trash in the "nice" places since this is where most of the people responsible for designing and producing this stuff tend to live and under our current arrangement these minds are somewhat insulated from the actual impact of producing long-lived objects of marginal utility.
    - wang_li 8y ago
      I get where you're coming from, but it wouldn't be $50/mo. These costs adjust with the cost of labor and land and so on. In the US the median household income is around $60,000/year. People pay ~$600/year for trash collection, or about 1% of the median income. In Vietnam, for example, the average annual income is in the area of $5,000/year (more in cities like Hanoi and HCMC, less in rural areas.) 1% of $5,000/year would be about $50/year, or $4-5/mo. People who are buying products that have the kind of waste byproducts that end up as litter will be able to afford paying an extra $5/month. I'll ask my friend what they pay for trash pickup. I'm sure there must be something because they didn't have huge piles of trash around their home.

c22 8y ago

You have to be able to afford to buy trash bags if you want to keep your trash from being in "a pile" and then what do you do with all these bags of trash? If your whole community is too poor to afford a garbage truck then who is coming 'round to pick up the garbage? Of course poor people in underserved communities could just haul their own trash to the "local pile", but who has time to do that when you're working to get food on the table?

wang_li 8y ago
Your post to me is quite strange because it describes a problem that has a certain floor on poverty, but then claims those being spoken about live below that floor. If you have plastic bottles, cans, and etc. you are not so poor as to be unable to manage your waste. The hyper impoverished people you describe, subsistence farmers, have compost, not non-biodegradable and unburnable waste.
- c22 8y ago
  I've never been to Vietnam and I wasn't attempting to describe any specific people. I was just addressing the idea that being poor is not a condition that might raise the bar for disposing of one's trash "properly" (or, for that matter, doing almost anything else). Where I live I spend $52 a month to have my trash picked up (and it just went up to $54). I can totally imagine a person or family who can afford to buy some things made of plastic (pretty much one of the cheapest materials in the world) but who would still be strained by an extra $50 obligation. Or people who can afford plastic but still live in a community that cannot afford to offer this service. I've seen photos of people living in mud and straw huts without windows or running water wearing Nikes so I suspect access to industrialized waste might be more accessible than you think. And I'm not saying even the poorest individual can't handle their own waste, I'm just positing that the effort required to do so is inversely correlated with income. If anything I'd prefer if people were more careless with their trash in the "nice" places since this is where most of the people responsible for designing and producing this stuff tend to live and under our current arrangement these minds are somewhat insulated from the actual impact of producing long-lived objects of marginal utility.
  - wang_li 8y ago
    I get where you're coming from, but it wouldn't be $50/mo. These costs adjust with the cost of labor and land and so on. In the US the median household income is around $60,000/year. People pay ~$600/year for trash collection, or about 1% of the median income. In Vietnam, for example, the average annual income is in the area of $5,000/year (more in cities like Hanoi and HCMC, less in rural areas.) 1% of $5,000/year would be about $50/year, or $4-5/mo. People who are buying products that have the kind of waste byproducts that end up as litter will be able to afford paying an extra $5/month. I'll ask my friend what they pay for trash pickup. I'm sure there must be something because they didn't have huge piles of trash around their home.