Trash talk

YOU can learn a lot about your fellow citizens by examining their rubbish, and I had two opportunities to do so in recent weeks thanks to the efforts of Rotaractors (aged 18 to 30), as the Royal Patron of Rotaract Clubs in District 3300 (which covers all states in Peninsular Malaysia except Melaka and Johor).

Picking up trash is just one of the typical activities organised by the 32 clubs, which are organised and named according to geographical areas or educational institutions.

The first trash hack which I joined took place in Kampung Baru Ampang.

Assembling at the community centre, we were given health and environmental briefings by local and state government representatives, and then we set off in four groups of eight, on different routes, armed with pickers, wheelbarrows, brooms and black bin bags simply to pick up rubbish.

Except sometimes, it was not that simple. Along the roads we found large pieces of broken furniture (for which lorries operated by local authority contractors had to be summoned to fetch), stinking plastic bags of food clogging up the roadside drains (which required precise aiming with the pickers) and decomposing corpses of various urban wildlife. But by far the most common items were cigarette butts, food wrappers, beverage cans and bottles. It seems impossible that the majority of these accidentally flew outdoors; more likely they were deliberately thrown out of car windows.

After turning into a residential area of terraced houses, I thought the job would get easier, but I was wrong: at the end of one street containing a few workshops, one abandoned lot featured a pyramid of waste. The lorry had to be summoned for that, too.

By the end of it, I was left wondering the thought process of those who litter carelessly: is the convenience of chucking rubbish out the window (or into a pre- existing pile) really so great as to outweigh the visual and olfactory assault later on – whether for yourself or your fellow citizen? Indeed, is there no sense of civic pride for even one’s own neighbourhoods?

I also pondered why some of these mountains of rubbish had been allowed to grow to such heights. Even if the root causes of the problem require long-term efforts to change mind- sets, surely it is still the duty of local authorities to remove the biggest eyesores, which may also pose health risks especially with the cesspools of stagnant water that form within them – rather than be alerted by volunteers.

But more questions were triggered by my second trash clean- up experience, in Langkawilastweekend.Aspartof a conference, Rotaractors joined the Langkawi Trash Heroes (one of 34 chapters operating in seven countries) in one of their regular weekend sessions where they locate a rubbish site and send in volunteers to clean it up.

Nothing could prepare me for the visual assault that greeted us on a rocky beach under the path of planes landing and taking off at Langkawi International Airport. Behind a wall and millipede-infested foliage separating the road and the beach, there lay a gargantuan pile of rubbish: it stretched for at least 200 metres, at some places four metres wide, and a metre deep. There was a multitude of water bottles, but also plenty of old footwear, baby products, tyres, plastic bags, fishing nets and, most worrying of all to sea life, the remnants of foam platforms disintegrating into more and more little pieces.

I was surprised at being told the source of the accumulation: not just the waste of tourist activity in the waters around Langkawi, but also stuff thrown into our rivers which eventually made their way to sea and subsequently washed up. More alarmingly, it takes only a few months for such a pile of that size to appear.

Even though many of us already practise the separation of our household rubbish, the experience emphasised the efforts still required to educate citizens and tourists of the health, environmental and aesthetic consequences of lackadaisical littering. And I can’t help but see in this tolerance for rubbish a metaphor for the state of our national institutions, where official clean-up agencies like the Malaysian Anti- Corruption Commission also have uphill battles to fight in terms of getting the public on side while fulfilling their statutory mandate.

I was thoroughly impressed by the attitude of the young Rotaractors who cooperated in hauling heavy items and forming a human chain to ferry the black bin bags up to the road. We collected nearly four tonnes in two hours. Perhaps, with concerted efforts, that too can be a metaphor for cleaning up the rubbish in our institutions. Tunku Zain Al-Abidin founding president of Ideas. is