City dustmen launch 'green' campaign

BANGKOK: Bangkok garbage collectors will soon start selling orange garbage bags while they make their rounds so that city residents can separate their toxic waste - such as used batteries, light bulbs and aerosol cans - from regular trash.

"This channel of distribution should be one of the most convenient for people and make our campaign of garbage separation a success," Bangkok Governor Samak Sundaravej said yesterday on Thai Environment Day.

He did not specify the price of the bags but said 1 per cent of the revenue would be given to the garbage collectors who sell them.

Samak said every household would be required to have orange garbage bags and leave them at designated points for Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) workers to collect.

The garbage-separation campaign is important because an estimated 8,950 tonnes of toxic waste was not being disposed of properly a year in Bangkok, said Taweesak Dechdecho, director of the public cleansing department.

The BMA currently treats just 52 tonnes of known toxic waste every year.

However, a study by the Health Systems Research Institute found that the capital generated 9,000 tonnes of toxic waste annually.

-- The Nation 2003-12-05

All well and good, anything is a help, the bigger problem I see is with the canals and the overall water supply. The canals are so dirty because of the Thai's themselves. It's not the farangs throwing garbage into the canals. It's the Thais that throw and dump most of the contaminents into the canals and then complain about the conditions. I used to live next to one of these canals and was blown away by the obvious non concern of the local people. The water supply is so bad in most places that as a homeowner you have to put in water filters to get all the bacteria out of it. "Good ole Thacksin" doesn't need any help from anyone and will do everything if the Thais keep his party in office for the next twenty years. NOT! The other problem is with the companies here not caring what they dump also. The government is so concerned about making money that they don't put proper laws into effect to control this. The reason some companies come here is because of these lax restrictions and the government doesn't care because they just want to make more money. I do blame the people themselves in some respect but I blame the government more for not giving the people proper education into what they are doing themselves. The government wants the smaller people to pay for the canal cleanup but then the smaller guys don't (in a lot of cases) make enough to support any such idea. It's still the idea of the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.