Having been to Guatemala, the culture is to throw most trash on the ground. The trash is then washed into the rivers during heavy rains. It's sad to see. The country has a lot of natural beauty, but there is trash everywhere.
Most cities don't even have a functioning, modern landfill, just clandestine piles served by dump truck. Much of the trash picked up by this effort may have literally already been collected and dumped by a truck in a pile by the river.
There's a big "broken windows" element to the continuation of the problem. It's going to take altruistically motivated, powerful regulators and a lot of money to fix, and neither is not easy to come by in Guatemala.
Caption to the first photo in TFA.
Might make for a useful pointed inquiry, as such gaps and loopholes are a stubbornly pervasive aspect of similar initiatives.
just from one language learner to another, so i hope you can appreciate this small grammatical correction:
> and neither is not easy to come by in Guatemala.
...the infamous 'double negative' que es correcto en español y otros, ¡pero es incorrecto en inglés!
it would seem to be true, and i would certainly defer to you, that altruistic minded and not toothless regulators, plus a whole lot of money are both necessary—and *neither is easy to come by in Guatemala.
again, great explanation of what might be difficult to comprehend from the perspective of others in this modern, interconnected world.
The TV was inundated with public service announcements shaming trash throwers in the USA for maybe 15 years. It made a difference.
Having seen similar "just throw it on the ground" behavior in India and china, I think that it may be a natural response in a rural culture that needs to be changed once it is in a city and non degrading packaging is used
Create an economy in which there is nothing to throw away, or in which costs of recovery and recycling are built in to the products themselves and effectively incentivise round-trip material flows, and the problem largely solves itself. Market dynamics tend strongly away from such mechanisms.
Free-market advocates like to point to the general success of anti-pollution, clean air, clean water, safety, and other similar measures in rich Western countries, without acceding in the least that overwhelmingly such progress has come through courts, legal processes, and social advocacy, rather than market mechanisms. Wealth overwhelmingly has shown that it is self-serving power, as Adam Smith noted nearly 250 years ago.
There's a 1967 interview of Ralph Nader by Studs Terkel I've recently run across, and which describes very much what's happening now as it did the circumstances of nearly 60 years ago, though the industries addressed have shifted somewhat. I cannot recommend this highly enough.
<https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/ralph-nader-discusses-...>
Direct audio: <https://s3.amazonaws.com/wfmt-studs-terkel/published/11364.m...> (MP3)
so i can totally see how it would happen if a country just doesn't have the proper infrastructure to start
I used to live alongside Truong Sa river and watched people dump their trash into it all day long. There is even a govt run group that goes up and down the river all day long picking up trash.
I've been following this group for a while now... they do cleanups all the time...
It's hard to shake natural habits from your youth, especially if you don't even care that much.
It is that people who have very little (or come from very little) care about different things, like putting food on the table, today. It is survival instinct only.
Quality of education goes a long way too. Do they teach sustainability in schools there? Even if they did, how many generations of kids do we have to go through before they teach these things to their kids?
There is no concept of a week or a month or 10 years from now. When you're lacking that, you have no care for the future or how your actions today, will affect things down the road.
It really was eye opening taking myself out of my nurture and actually living in a place like SE Asia.