I WENT down this morning to open the gate for the househelp who comes in weekly for basic chores around the house, and I see partly smoked cigarette butts on the ground right in front of the gate.
This annoyed me to no end because this happens every so often. There is a ledge of some sort beside the gate, which used to be a plant box without plants, and which none of my neighbors cared about planting with anything. So our landlady cemented it over, and now that is where we put out our garbage bags every other day for pickup by the local government trash takers.
But after the garbage is taken away, or on days when there are no trash bags there, it becomes a convenient sitting stoop for drivers of the vehicles owned by the dwellers of the condominium beside us, or of job applicants who fill up forms, or wait for their turn to be called in for interviews at a placement office in the same building.
These people don’t throw just cigarette butts; they leave their empty juice doypacks, snack food packs, plastic cups, food in styro containers they no longer have a taste for and what not. I tell the condo’s guards fairly regularly to kindly remind those job applicants and drivers not to leave anything on that ledge, or stop littering our street with their cigarette butts.
You see, this is a perpetual bad habit of most of us Filipinos. We are always praised as a people for being clean in our households, of taking baths once or twice a day and making sure our immediate surroundings are just spic and span with every furniture and doodad in place. Yet you will often see people flicking their cigarette butts out of moving cars, leaving their food wrappers and other leftovers on the tables in fast-food centers and not even sweeping up fallen leaves right outside their gates.
On Monday I was sent some photos of plastic cups and spoons left at the base of coconut trees supposedly by tourists in Boracay, which is undergoing a dry run until October 25. I asked the woman who sent those photos to me if she actually saw who threw them. She admitted that she did not, and acknowledged that the trash could very well have been thrown by the locals as there was an ice-cream company handing out free products to celebrate the partial reopening of the island.
Most media outlets, however, had already run with the story and blamed tourists, and spread the photos without actually double-checking with the government authorities that have been overseeing the dry run. But guess what? On Monday there were only 19 tourists allowed to enter the island; the rest were residents (1,043) and workers (3,156), according to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. The local population is about 50,000.
So the likelihood of tourists creating the mess on Boracay’s first-day dry run is practically nil. And while I don’t want this to sound like a locals versus tourists situation, let me just say that when I visited the island at end of September for a press coverage, I saw plastic bottles strewn on the beach, and food waste along the beach path.
Tourists had been strictly prohibited for the last six months until Monday’s lucky 19. It’s pretty clear to me who has been responsible for the mess on the island these past few days.
And while people can always blame the lack of trash bins as the reason they throw their waste wherever they want, a well-disciplined person and someone who has the heart for the environment, will likely hold on to it until they get to a place with receptacles where they can dispose their trash.
Again, it is quite a Pinoy trait—we keep ourselves clean but throw everything away and anywhere we want. It is a cultural quirk that needs to be addressed urgently through education and constant reminders.
I recently saw an PSA on a news channel showing how elementary schoolchildren were sticking waste wrappers and stuffing them into empty water gallons for turning over to a company that makes eco-bricks. I hope this isn’t a one-time thing, and that all schools should keep teaching its students to pick up after themselves and dispose of waste they see anywhere in the proper trash bins.
Our local government has scored a modicum of success in disciplining our neighborhood to segregate our trash between food waste, recyclables and biodegradables and plastics. Biodegradables are picked up on Mondays and Fridays, while plastics are picked up on Wednesdays. (I don’t get though why it only picks up glass bottles on plastics day, when it is a recyclable.) But if you mix the two types of trash in one bag, the trash guys will leave your garbage.
If we must be clean up after ourselves, it should also follow that we make sure our immediate surroundings and our environment are neat, as well. Remember what Lola used to say: “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.”
Image credits: Stella Arnaldo