Lets be nice to the trees

By Neil Armstrong

The division in concept between a well regulated and implicated recycling policy and effective refuse disposal is rarely better illustrated than when I’m walking to and through my nearest downtown at 9 a.m.

The refuse in the apartment complex area I start out from is collected to the point of invisibility before 9 a.m. The soft green sidewalk-covering the city has recently laid makes the streets beyond tender enough for bare feet. What is more, litter seems allergic to it. Anyone with a whistling habit could cheerfully practice it until the left turn to get onto the main road.

But here the situation literally takes a turn for the worse. Now come the five-meter-interval refuse collection posts. Full trash bags and the detritus they attract are piled up at the foot of these collection posts throughout the day. The posts, just for the record, are also known as trees. One tree in particular must have been involved in genocide in a previous life to deserve the quantity of dumped produce it plays host to around its trunk base.

I’m still looking for a trash can as I pass the stainless steel cigarette butt station outside the medical building at the foot of the hill. The butt station still has the peel on it which states in English that it is indeed stainless steel, as if to allay the fears of concerned smokers worried that the act of stubbing out might sully the shine produced when the sun glints off their free outdoor ashtray.

Around the corner, a man-tall mound of sixty liter capacity yellow and green government-issue trash bags slouches defiantly. The see-through bags demonstrate just how conscientiously people separate can and bottle and paper from that destined for land refill, but unfortunately obscure the view of the lovely gardens outside the new Catholic cathedral.

As I wait to cross the street, more bags ― from one of the tightly knit commercial districts ― hove into view. Now they are joined by independent items of litter that are yet to be bagged. A recent addition to the community of ice cream chain stores oftentimes plays host to a morning swirl of litter. It swirls even when there’s no wind as if it’s worried it’ll be caught and disposed of.

Looking around, the trash is so widely scattered that I’m working on the assumption one of the coffee shop owners arrives at work by helicopter. But I don’t begrudge him his need to circumvent the traffic. That shutter is not going to open itself. However, the effect of the trash is beginning to take the sheen off the wide choice of beverages he offers.

And then I see him. In the summer, he’s usually wearing a sleeveless vest and short pants which reach his sandals. In the winter, he’s usually wearing a sleeveless vest and short pants which reach his sandals but now he’s wearing socks. He’s armed with a noisy twig brush and sometimes a hose. He thwacks his red carpets against the wall and smiles at you as he coats your hair in dust.

The patch of wet-stained concrete he cleanses runs exactly the length of his shop and half the width of the street. His civic pride extends that far and no further. But the outside of his store is marked by a startling absence of business cards advertising cheap loans; there are never any aggregations of machine coffee cups; and I’ve yet to step in something previously digested that cats will later show a picky interest in. He is, in other words, a local hero. The store, by the way, looks like the contents of a seventies fairground run through a car compactor and redistributed through a thresher, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is the pedestrian way outside his place of business is clean. Why aren’t all the others?

It is not like this everywhere. My morning walk just seems to plot a particularly unimpressive route. In the main, there are broader roads with bigger buildings and newer pavements which don’t have a litter problem at all. And in any case trash, at least a certain amount of it, is inevitable. It has its own esthetic value in the marketplace as evidence of production consumed and I’m as regular as the next man in producing as much of it in one day as every fish that has ever existed will ever do until the sun explodes.

But unlike fish, and often to our cost, we have government. So if we can peacefully coexist with fish, as George W. Bush once solemnly reminded us we can, then we can also organize a strictly enforced trash collection rota. And hold business owners responsible for the few square meters of property outside the other few they pay rent on.

The writer is a lecturer at Kyungnam University. He can be reached at aex_nba@yahoo.co.uk.