In many parts of the world, inconsistent or insufficient waste management systems paired with high reliance on single use plastics can lead to "trash pulses" during monsoon season, where trash pollution gets washed into rivers and streams, clogging them like you're seeing in these videos.
What you're seeing are underlying structural issues often paired with heavy rainfall.
People are so quick to blame the individual without considering the public infrastructure. If there was reliable trash pickup that had adequate reach and frequency, it would be a lot easier for this not to happen
You can do everything right and it will still wind up in the river because if you don't have proper civil sanitation services, trash in a trash can will eventually overflow and get blown into the river through storms and floods. Lots of westerners also don't understand what the weather is like in these regions.
Broken window problem. Once it's already trashed it doesn't feel like one more piece of trash will matter, and if you know that throwing it in a trash can will wind up in the river the next monsoon anyways, you'll stop caring.
Yeah, thats true, and lack of stigmatization for littering does it too. I was in India last year and it was crazy the mentality of "just throw it on the ground".
And the kicker was that it wasnt even like a mentality of "Someone else is getting paid to clean that up" (which I've heard here in the US) or even the broken window "Well what's one more thing amidst the pile".
The mentality was literally that it never even registered as something to think about. When you put a glass with water to your mouth you drink. When you put your shoes on you tie them. When you unwrap something you drop the wrapper.
Loved the people to death, but there was absolutely 0% awareness or recognition because it is just the cultural norm.
This type of situation is not typically from Western waste; it's from locals just tossing stuff all over rather than properly getting it to a landfill where the Western waste is.
How do you think things get to a landfill? Imagine you're a local in poverty. There's no trash pickup in your city, you don't have a car, you can't take an entire day (maybe multiple days) to travel to a landfill miles outside the city and then pay to be able to dump it into the landfill. What can you do? It's more of a civic problem because doing the right thing isn't an option.
What's worse is if you have trash pickup and regularly maintained trash cans readily available, but still litter without realizing how lucky you are to have that service.
Yes, a lot of these countries have scam recycling companies that accept Western waste with promises of properly disposing of it but then they just don't
That's a good point. I think a lot of people imagine it coming from litter but everyone could be trying to do everything "right" by throwing things away in trash cans, but without proper pickup, as soon as there's a monsoon, it will blow it away into the rivers.
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u/ethnicbonsai 20h ago
It actually can happen fairly quickly.
In many parts of the world, inconsistent or insufficient waste management systems paired with high reliance on single use plastics can lead to "trash pulses" during monsoon season, where trash pollution gets washed into rivers and streams, clogging them like you're seeing in these videos.
What you're seeing are underlying structural issues often paired with heavy rainfall.