Anyway, what I noticed this trip disappointed me.
When I got there, while waiting for my sister to come home, we loitered around the lift lobby area on the ground floor. Eating something out of a plastic bag, I asked Cerys to go throw it in the bin when she was done. And when she wanted to do that, she toddled to the bin, looked inside, ran back and asked:
'Mummy, where's the recycling bin?' or, something to that effect in her own language.
I beamed. Ahh, how proud I am of her. But then it sunk in. Hm, where IS the recycling bin?
Over the next couple of days, I kept a look out everywhere I looked. From the ground up to the units, no sight of recycling bins or anything suggesting the like. Walking to the MRT station about 300m away, nada. MRT station shopping area, nada. MRT station, nada. WHERE ARE THEY?
Dunno, but if a very land-scarce country like Singapore doesn't separate it's waste and deal with it responsibly, where does all that rubbish go?
What I did see was on TV. On buses. On books. This Green thingie. It seems to be everywhere. But ground level, it doesn't look that great. Where can people put their recyclables if there aren't anywhere for them to put them? Out of sight, out of mind.
Shopping, bags seem to be everywhere. Well, so far, that isn't that different from it is here in the Klang Valley.
And at the end of my trip, just a mere 4 days, I've accumulated a thick stack of good quality card meant as parking tickets. Where to responsibly throw? Hm. Makes me quite happy we don't need to deal with all that paper here. We do, but seems a lot less.
Brought those back. Cerys had fun with them as toys. Now that she's done, into my recycling pile.
These are just a few of the things I have noticed while I was there. Perhaps I didn't go to the right places to see the right stuff. Perhaps someone will correct me and shed some light on this.
I think most of their waste goes to material recovery facilities, and then if the recycling facility is not available in Singapore, the separated waste, e.g. paper and aluminium, gets sent to facilities in Malaysia and Thailand that will buy the scrap and use it in the manufacturing process. But it does make me wonder -- this makes everything so much more labour-intensive and time-consuming. Wouldn't it make much more sense to get people to sort their own waste, rather than pay migrant labour to do it?
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