Right around Easter is when spring actually springs around Ukraine. Basically, this is the one time of the year when everyone comes together, takes to the streets and parks with rakes, brooms, and hoes in hand and makes a collective beautification effort. People post signs in apartment buildings asking everyone to bring tools to clean and/or plant new flowers and the like. All businesses require at least some staff to participate in the cleaning of the area around the business or store. Heck, the school required all of the teachers and students to take an hour out of class time to clean up around the school. During these “SOO-BOAT-NICKS” which is really a throwback term to the days of communism when everyone would be required to come out on a Saturday to do “collective” work (суббота/SOO-BOAT-AH being the Russian word for Saturday), all of the debris like leaves and dead branches that either came with winds over the winter or were covered by the snows and lay dead all winter finally get collected, and for a brief moment, small town Ukraine looks beautiful. I am certain I have talked about this in the past as it is just about the only thing I really do not like about this country: the litter/garbage situation. It is still unclear to me what exactly the municipal waste removal plan actually is around here. There are garbage dumpsters near most apartment buildings and on many streets, but the frequency that they are emptied is difficult to pinpoint, as is the final destination of the collected trash. I mean, in America you may not have a landfill in your town, but you at least probably know the location of a dump or two. Not so here. I have never seen an actual waste collection center of any kind (although I did hear once of a place in Simferopol that collects recyclable material). There is not a garbage day per se, where, say, every Wednesday night you bring your garbage to the curb for pick up. Instead, everyone takes their bag to these community dumpsters- on their way to work or so. Sadly, if they arrive to the container to see it is full (or more likely overflowing), the likelihood of someone turning around and returning the bag to their house or even keeping it until they pass the next container, is nil. The bag just gets flung in the general vicinity (usually from a passing bicycle) of the dumpster and is out of mind only seconds later. However, as the bag arrives, it is a now in the hands (or paws as it were) of the stray animals who make camp nearby waiting for their next meal. They go after the bags whether it makes it into the dumpster or rolls down the side coming to rest on the ground. At least if the bag starts in the dumpster when it is torn apart there is a better likelihood that the contents will only spill further down into the container and not onto the road where the cars, pedestrians, wind or other animals carry it away creating a concentric pattern of litter around the hub. So there’s that which I will call partially natural litter since an animals’ hunger instincts are partially responsible, and I can’t really fault them for wanting to survive. Then there is the completely unnatural type of litter where people of all ages seem to have no compunction about tossing their unwanted scraps of garbage onto the street- or more specifically just away from their body letting it fall wherever it lands. If you stand at the door of a store that sells cigarettes, you will see a large number of cellophane wrappers on the ground and strew about in the bushes where they get tossed by smokers too eager to get their newly purchased butt lit to be bothered to worry about finding a garbage can which is usually within a few feet. It is not like there are no cans, it is just easier to toss it on the ground than in the basket. In some cases someone will toss a cigarette butt into the can before extinguishing it, causing a trash can fire.
Laziness and disrespect for community are the only explanation I can find for this litter situation. The other kind of waste I see daily is the non-litter waste of leaves, grass, and branches from bushes and small trees that gets raked up into a pile and does leave a better looking area. Right now, the community is in clean up mode and there is a lot of yard waste being raked. Herein lays the problem. Handwritten in chalk on many dumpsters are signs telling people not to throw their yard waste into these dumpsters (presumably because then virtually zero garbage would make it into the container!)
So what else can be done? Everyone just sets fire to their pile, of course. Fire safety? No way. Open flame laws? Perish the thought. It is every man for himself in terms of disposal. The thing is that as I walk around town, there is a blanket of smoke from burning leaves that can make it so difficult to breathe.
Sometimes you will get several houses on one street burning all at the same time and the cumulative smoke is horrible. It can be odd as you walk home and pass an unattended pile with 4 foot flames. Can you imagine if you were walking past your neighbor’s house and they had a bonfire sized pile burning with no one around- you may even be tempted to knock on the door to ask them if they know there is a fire in their yard. Not here. In fact, I rarely see anyone with a match. Instead, people just leave the smoldering pile of ash in the front of their house and just keep adding to the pile letting embers eventually catch the newly piled level.
I recently gave a presentation to a class of seventh graders about the importance of clean water and how air pollution such as from burning debris or garbage contaminates the water we would drink if it wasn’t polluted.
It will take a very long time (longer than I will be here anyway) to change this mindset. Asking residents who don’t own cars to bring their yard waste to a dumping site to be composted or mulched when they can just burn it and be rid of it in moments is farther than a longshot, but maybe, just maybe I was able to plant a seed in some of the minds of the kids that things need to change in their lifetime to make things better for the next lifetime. The tradeoff between the way the place will look for a few weeks (before the amount of litter grows to noticeable levels) and the quality of the air is difficult to rationalize since it seems like an ingrained cycle. Toss garbage all year àclean and burn garbage and debris once a year à repeat. It has been done this way forever and me changing that is not a realistic goal. I can only hope someone changes it for themselves based on what I have shown them.
No comments:
Post a Comment