Sometimes discouraged by wastefulness in thailand.

[BlueSkyCowboy]

not just food, water too

flushing BEFORE you go???

like a little bit of pee is going to jump out of the water and harm you

<deleted>?

My wife from Issan does that too, flush before. Of course we did not grow up in Issan. It shows me how slowly people change and learn.

[BlueSkyCowboy]

No more than the wastefulness elsewhere; in fact the Thai's probably do far more with less 'stuff' than most westerners ..

Story goes that the US could feed Canada (30 million people) with the food wasted every day.

[h90]

ordering food for 10 people if 2 dishes would be enough...-->the rest in the junk

[Wat dee]

Nothing to compared Europeans or Americans.

[mgjackson69]

People in other cultures are wasteful, so that makes it acceptable here?

The discussion is about Thai culture, not other places.

It is interesting to not, as others have mentioned, the Thais are not wastedful with rice. The children are told about how hard people work to "make the rice", and it is disrespectful of that hard work to waste a single grain of rice.

Sent from my Xoom using Thaivisa Connect Thailand mobile app

[attrayant]

A lot of you, perhaps most, are conflating wastefulness (throwing away resources) with conspicuous consumption (showing off/using excessive resources).

Stop it right now.

My experience has been that Thais save and reuse everything until it has absolutely fallen apart. My inlaws have a yard full of scrap - keeping it because "might use it some day". Even a rusted section of a car underframe. I'm not sure what they plan to do with it, but by god that will surely save our lives some day so don't throw it away!

As for the littering: I am not sure about the culture here, but the popular mindset in Vietnam is that littering provides work for the street sweepers. People actually see it as a citizen's duty to drop trash in the street. Not sure if that's the case here.

[impulse]

I'm amazed at how little goes to waste. Head off to BKK Chinatown on a Sunday morning to see recycling in action.

The ladies that pick up the garbage at my apartment go through it and pick out what they want. Then the bring it to the street.

The guys who put the garbage into the truck spread it out on the street and pick out what they want before they haul it to the dump.

I figure the guys at the dump pick out what they can sell before they toss it into the landfill.

Then I Imagine the guys scrounging through the landfill pick out anything they can sell to scrap dealers.

My image is that a few banana peels actually end up staying at the dump, but that may be wishful thinking...

And I agree with attrayant about the litter. It's largely about the ricebowl...

Edited December 2, 2013 by impulse

[menorah]

This reads like a TROLL but whatever....

the guilty party is the Thai government, or at least that echelon of Thai Society that 'holds court' over the other 98% and simultaneously provides a level of education designed to perpetuate stupidity of the masses and then re enforce that catastrophe with Channel 7 Thai Drama brain-washing each evening for 2 hours at a stretch.

So some Thais flush before pissing or don't flush after shitting, for whatever reason they behave like this, it's of no real importance in the scheme of things.

Good quality basic education where students are encouraged to question their teaching, environment, society and culture is the key to resolving most, if not all the issues which confound, frustrate and confuse us farang.

As mentioned by another TV member...ignoring how 'they' behave but maintaining one's own personal standards may, by some measure initiate a positive response by 'them' and thereby bring about change by 'passive' example.

One small tip to OP...

before 'binning' the hundreds of plastic bags collected each day, try knotting them a couple of times. This does at least prevent them blowing everywhere once the recycle guys and street dogs have tipped out the bin contents during the night !

[khrab]

Hm,

in my little Northern village is works this way:

My neighbor takes care of my trash. I keep everything plastic, soda cans, glass bottles apart for her. She seperates the rest what is useful and takes it to the local "recycling centre". Last time she came home with 160 baht. Don't know how much trash that was. Alternatively I could just place the trash bags in front of my gate. The collecters come every day and pick them up for free.

Leftovers. What leftovers? Well, sometimes "antiques" surface while cleaning the refridgerators. Any old food goes to the dog and chicken. (Luckily they live at Mama's house at the other end of the village.)

Tap water comes out of the local river and the waste water goes into the roadside ditch....and back into the river later.

About 90% of my shopping I do at makro. So no plastic bags. The few ones I get will be used as trash bags. I even have to buy addditional ones. At makro.

I have a lot of friends working in differnt restaurants. I can asure you that no food there goes to waste. If it is not eaten by guests, it is eaten by staff. Sometimes they asked me to take this or that from the buffet. I said I don't want it. "But we.". So anything left behind by the customer is a "tip" for staff.

[willyumiii]

People wasting food and water left and right.

One day this will have to stop as the population grows and resources become in shorter supply.

No one else notices or cares, yet?

No one else notices this flushing the toilet BEFORE they do their business.

Quite common actually.

SIGH

absolute nonsense. Look at Briggsy's link. Apart from that, if you talk about food, what about the gigantic portions being gobbled down by Americans and Australians? No man needs that much food. Not only are they even wasting more food, they are also creating serious health issues that require much more resources in terms of additional health care, medicine, use of cars ..... the list goes on. Go figure it out and you will realize you're just spouting nonsense.

And bedore I forget - have you ever been to parts of mainland China where they still don't flush before they leave the toilet?

Sent from my iPad using Thaivisa Connect Thailand mobile app

when you consider that the average thai is under 50 kg wringing wet and the average farang is 85 plus kg of course they eat bigger meals. You tend to eat what your body burns during the day so the bigger you are the more you need, I find the average thai serve is just about 2/3 of a meal for me unless I am not really hungry then its fine.

Funny.

Looks like I have is backasswards again!

The more I eat, the bigger I get!

[mca]

The ones that do me are the pizza delivery companies. I ordered a pizza garlic bread etc combo once and it came with no less ( and sad bastard that I am I counted ) 15 sachets of ketchup/chilli sauce. I won't even go into the fact that putting ketchup on even a dodgy Pizza Company pizza is sacrilege anyhow....

[willyumiii]

My family and people of my village let no food go to waste.

All food is eaten of fed to animals that will be eaten or to the dogs.

They do recycle everything that can be sold.

They are poor people.

However, they are very bad about garbage and litter disposal.

There is no garbage collection service available.

All garbage is burned, toxic or not.

It is still a common practice to buy something, unwrap it and drop the wrapper on the ground.

But consider the following :

My homeland, the U.S.A., currently makes up 4.6% of the world population.*

The U.S.A. currently consumes 30% of the world's resources*

THAT IS WASTEFUL AND DISCUSSING!.

*I Goggled these statistics today.

[GinBoy2]

Energy consumption per capita in the USA is more than 4 times that in Thailand.

Now, what were you saying about Thai wastefulness...?

Well, I believe that he might have been referring to the lack of recycling, the use of plastic, the littering that takes place, the refusal of Thai people to use doggy bags to take left over food home from restaurants, our of fear of being embarrassed in front of their guests, etc, etc. Not just the level of consumption.

The doggy bag thing is interesting. We always take home leftovers from restaurants, but I would agree many don't. My wife's take on this is that it's a Hi So, Lo So thing. The Hi So's don't give a crap what people may think, I've paid for it, I'm taking it. But for the Lo So's it's an embarrassment thing to ask to ask to take food home. Sounds crazy, but hey I've come across crazier Thai thinking