For the most part all of my stories about living in Thailand for more than 5 years have been stories about how elated I am to be here and how reluctant I am to return to life in the west even though especially from a financial point of view, it would be in my best interests to do so. I think / fear that I keep making excuses to not return and instead will do whatever I have to do, including get a graduate degree in Education online somehow, in order to not have to return to the United States. I don't know how it really is over there but from afar, the news that I get shows me that America has just become rather insane and I don't want any part of that.
Thailand just seems to win on almost every front and they constantly impress me with how simplicity is sometimes the best. We don't really need all the crap that we have in the west and that is something I think about on a regular basis.
However, that doesn't mean that it is perfect over here. There's always going to be something that a country does that I consider to be wrong and in the case of waste-management, Thailand doesn't really seem to have much of anything in that regard.
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When people think about Thailand, they probably think about something like the above picture, or a beautiful pristine beach, or about how sometimes the ladyboys are better looking than the women are. These are all just things that you see from afar though or perhaps it is just the impression that people have when they have never actually even been over here. For example: Most of the people I know kind of scoff at the fact that I live over here and just presume that prostitution is everywhere and in your face all the time. That is not the case at all. If you are looking for it you can find it, this much is true. If you are just living your life though, you might not even know that this side of society exists at all.
One thing that you can't possibly miss once you leave a tourist area in this country though is the fact that this place is just a mess of mostly plastic garbage that just fills up the sides of the road basically everywhere in the country including not far from these pristine beaches that are cleaned purely for the sake of tourism.
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While I have never lived there, I have friends that live in Phuket, Krabi, Bangkok, and Koh Samui and all of them will say basically the same thing in that if you get just a few kilometers from the tourist areas there is garbage all over the place. Of course the above image is cherry-picked to make it look as bad as possible, almost all beaches have some level of plastic waste that just stays there until the tide pulls it out, and then when the tide comes back in it puts it back in a different place.
Here in Chiang Mai we don't have an ocean, but we do have plenty of waterways and during rainy season, this is where a great deal of the garbage ends up. Another thing that leads to a lot of garbage being just everywhere is the near complete lack of actual bins or "trash cans" outside of anyone's house.
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Even when there are garbage bins available there are normally far too few of them and this results in the people having no choice but to put garbage bags around these bins on the ground. Shortly after their placement and normally at night, the street dogs and rats quickly set in and open these same bags and spread the garbage all over the street.
Outside of busy areas of Bangkok and downtown Chiang Mai, there isn't really any sort of crews that clean up scattered waste and between the wind and rain this stuff just ends up going into a waterway of some sort.
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The Chao Phraya river in Bangkok is particularly bad for this and if it weren't for the cleanup crews there that entire river would just be completely filled with plastic waste. Even in my tiny community of San Sai Noi, the mad-made waterways are normally choking with plastic waste and it bothers me when I see kids swimming in it. I'm not going to try to tell them how to live their lives but if there is that much plastic in there, imagine what else is?
This is a big part of the reason why nobody drinks water from the taps here. It's a great way to make yourself seriously ill. Everyone buys drinking water from a supplier and of course, most of this arrives in plastic bottles which just makes the problem even worse. I have organized a water delivery system where the glass bottles are reused, but most people don't bother with this and simply throw away plastic Dasani bottles into their regular garbage. There is no centralized recycling system here.
I suppose the one shining hope is that there are private recycling centers here and therefore we have people that go around and will pick up the plastic trash from time to time in order to sell it but when you consider that there are 76 million people in Thailand, there is a lot of waste that just ends up blowing in the breeze. I have NEVER seen a proper garbage truck here although I would imagine the MUST exist in Bangkok because I don't know how else they could possibly do it.
Thailand is a wonderful place and I am very happy that I live here but I just don't believe the locals care enough about any property that they do not personally live on to actually give a crap about what happens on the outside of their own fence. I don't see any way that they could fix this either. Every now and then some politician will enact some sort of "go green" initiative but as soon as they hooplah dies down and they get recognition for their "good deeds" the programs always immediately fall apart and are forgotten about until someone else comes along and makes empty promises about the same thing.
I think it is a bit sad that in order for a place to be clean and have proper waste management it needs to be a tourist area so that the people who visit there get the very untrue impression that Thailand is a very clean place. It's not the dirtiest place I have ever been, but it is pretty bad.