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| Collection of debris at a pier on Chao Phraya River - Bangkok's main river |
For the next 5/6 months, I'll be traveling around South East Asia, documenting the plastic pollution issue here and more importantly, what's being done by governments, companies and people with regards to combating it. This a region that contains three of the world's five major contributors of ocean plastics: Thailand, Vietnam and Philippines, with the other two not too far away: China and Sri Lanka.
Before we begin though, it's worth mentioning that despite the UK having a higher plastic packaging recycle rate than is required by EU law, a lot of this waste is and has been sent to other countries - predominantly Asian countries with already struggling waste management systems - where it just needs to make its way out of the UK to be classed as having been recycled. No checks in the recieving country are made to verify this, so keep this in mind before getting on any high horse.
For example, China used to receive two thirds of our exported plastic waste, before they banned it at the beginning of 2018 and handed over to Malaysia to deal with.
My first stop was Bangkok, a city where someone or something is trying to sell you food, clothes, sunglasses, scorpions, massages, crocodile skewers etc etc. With everything (that can be wrapped in plastic) wrapped in plastic. Buying a single can of beer from the offies would even warrant a plastic bag (of which 70 million are used a year in Thailand as a whole) and a plastic straw (wrapped in plastic film!), then when you tell them you don't need it they would sometimes look slightly confused. It almost seems a very Western thing to have such an issue with plastic. I think the reason is that plastic is a very hygenic material, giving a level of hygene not previously available to the Thai people. It can often be quite difficult to detach yourself from this idea because the abundance of plastic in day to day life seems almost like an obsession, with this single use material easily finding its way into many (*all) of Bangkok's waterways. According to the UN, 51,000 tonnes of the stuff makes its way into the ocean each year from Thai waterways which isn't surprising in the slightest.
One thing that really bothered me was the Loi Krathong festival, a name that translates as "to float a basket" and all of the baskets I saw had polystyrene bases wrapped with banana leaves. These would be decorated with flowers and floated out into the rivers and lakes of Bangkok. The pictures below show the beauty of the festival but also the wasteful aftermath polluting the water (also highlighting the general state of the rivers here).
Whilst this makes Bangkok seem as if it doesn't care, having spoken with a friend who has been living here for the past few years, that's not quite the case. First of all, we met up in Chatuchak Park where they had a handful of static garbage wheels (below - slightly similar to Mr Trash Wheel in Baltimore harbour) which would turn on at sunset and collect larger bits of plastic in its collection buckets. These (I assume) would be collected later on or the following morning.
She also told me that people were beginning to think of alternatives for the polystyrene used during the Loi Krathong festival. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see any of these alternatives.
One thing I did see almost immediately in Bangkok was the lack of recycling facilities (whether that be in the street or in my hostel). I found a couple in some areas but they definitely weren't commonplace.
I mentioned this to my friend and she told me that this was because they recycle further down the line, with people being employed to sort through general waste and pick out the recyclable materials. So improvements in the recycling infrastructure for the public may be hindered as it will inevitably cause a loss of jobs further down the line. This can make it seem like Thailand doesn't take recycling very seriously at all when it's just being done at a different part of the chain than ours. Although only 20% of household waste is currently recycled, showing that this manual sorting technique is no where near as efficient as it should be.
Despite a more negative than positive start, I'm hoping to find more positive stories to be able to write about, although much of the coming posts will highlight how big the issue is out here.
Check out the photos below of my plastic encounters throughout Bangkok!
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