Vietnam is definitely a developing nation. There are some beautiful and scenic places, some ancient historical treasures, and the people are friendly and humble.
But the country has a problem with trash. Maybe it’s because there is no infrastructure to dispose of it, or it’s just habit, but there is trash everywhere.
I noticed it the minute we stepped out of the airport terminal in the evening in Hanoi. There was smoke in the air. I later figured out that it’s because people are burning trash, in their yards, in the fields, on the sidewalks in front of their houses and shops in barrels, on the pavement, sometimes on the grass in the parks.
There are many beautiful places, homes, shops, and right next door on an empty lot there are weeds, bushes, and large piles of open trash. For every nice place, there are five trashy places.
I took the photo below when I walked along the beach – to the right – in the evening. The sidewalk was full of trash. The fishing gear to the right belongs to some fisherman who will come back in the morning and use it, but the sidewalk is just covered with trash.
We took a boat ride down a river in a city. As we got off the boat (in the back), we walked by piles of trash accumulated over a long period along the area where the boats dock to let off the tourists. This does not seem to bother anybody. It’s obviously been there a long time.
At one time I was sitting in our bus while we were waiting at a red light in a town in the country. All of a sudden an old man walked out into the street and dumped a plastic container full of trash into the middle of the road and just casually walked back into his shop. You can see him here walking back. I was stunned. It took me a few seconds to grab my phone to take this picture. I didn’t catch him in the act. As you can see, it not just perishable garbage, like banana peels and other organic stuff, it’s also paper like a cigarette box on the left.
He obviously did it because he knew that the constant traffic would basically grind the trash to pieces in a short time. As you can see, the first car drove right over it.
Here is the trash after a few cars did their work. The man is back in his shop, business as usual.
I was dumbfounded, but then again, the other option he probably has is to collect it all in a barrel and set that on fire once a week.
There was garbage everywhere, and there was always smoke from the incessant burning of garbage, both in the cities and in the countryside.
It’s easy for me to to indignant and judgmental about this, but I ask myself: If I lived there, and there was nobody that came to to my house with a truck once a week to pick up my trash, like it’s done here, what would I do?
When I was a kid in the US south back in the mid-60s there was no trash pickup. We composted all the vegetable matter and my father burned the rest in a little brick hearth at the far edge of our yard, even things like tin cans. We saved all the glass bottles and lids for putting up food, sealed by paraffin, which was reused over and over. My grandmother had an old corn crib on her property and all kinds of bigger stuff went into that, because people reused things–the bed springs of today might mend something tomorrow. The burning of our household garbage only went on for a year or so before our very small town instituted town wide garbage pickup. I have no idea where it went after that–I’d guess a dump somewhere out in the country– but we kept up the composting as we had a big fruit and veg garden. Some things like soda bottles were returned for deposit and reused! These glass bottles had the location of the local bottling company printed on the bottom and we kids always checked (on the rare occasions we had soft drinks) to see where ours were from.
It’s hard to believe now, but that’s what happened. There was trash everywhere back then–all over the streets and highways, in people’s yards (not ours, my father was a stickler for neatness). Then Lady Bird Johnson joined the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign and it got better…but I do still see a LOT of random trash on our streets. I live in the northeast now in a mostly urban area. Kind of like all the “quit smoking” campaigns, Keep America Beautiful was propaganda of the best kind and mostly worked on us. I wonder if it would now!
That brings up one of my pet peeves: Ashtrays in cars. New cars don’t have ashtrays anymore. I can’t figure out why. People are still smoking. If you are a smoker, and there is no ashtray in the car, you just about HAVE TO throw the butt out the window. How is that a good idea?