picking up trash, cigarette butts, and habits
picking up trash, cigarette butts, and habits.
Surround yourself with good people; surround yourself with positivity and people who are going to challenge you to make you better.
- Ali Krieger
Our school organized a #pickuptrash activity, primarily targeted towards middle school kids. We arrived at JinJi Lake, Suzhou, around 8 am, set out to pick up trash around the whole lake, and hopefully inspire some passengers nearby to learn more about the origins of our waste and how we deposit them. Surprisingly, there was way less trash than we had expected. There are always bagfuls of trash and litter everywhere in many pictures and events like this posted over the media. That’s what we thought too. But, we ended up with only a few small trash bags, and that’s only because we looked in every bush and every crack there was.
Of course, this is good news, fantastic news! With a popular tourist spot with tens of thousands of visitors every year with “nearly no” trash, imagine what else we can do? If we can take action and build more communities and environments like these, we could also come to tackle bigger and more complicated projects.
As we walked down the lake and noticed the absence of trash, I also noticed more trash cans (one every few hundred meters) and more cleaning workers. (Stationed at a post every 500 meters or so) That is probably why these places have been getting cleaner and cleaner. Simple changes and utilities like these can change the entire appearance of a city.
However, by looking at the trash we collected, most of them were cigarette butts. no matter how many times we may pick up trash, it seems to be everywhere (At least in Suzhou.) Is it because the smokers in China take up one-third of all smokers on the planet? Or is it because smokers will use up to nearly ten cigarettes every day on average? Yes, and no. Sure, one of the main reasons there are so many cigarettes on the ground is because there are so many smokers, but another reason is that smoking can form habits, and habits, are not easy to break. Only 3% of smokers can quit smoking on their own, think of how hard it must be to break habits! One of the primary reasons that ordinary people eating snacks can throw their packaging into the trash can, yet smokers throw cigarette butts onto the ground is that they simply aren’t used to the fact that they should throw it away into a proper place. Smoking should be a form of relief, and the movement of throwing it away is probably just not natural. It may seem to be too much trouble to have to throw away the cigarettes after smoking, but really, it is such a small simple movement, and a little practice of willpower shouldn’t hurt.
Habits like smoking, littering, and many others are all the causes of today's many environmental problems. Small habits that seem natural to do, pile up and become serious. There is a famous theory known as the “Broken Window Effect” (You can search it up online), and basically, it believes that if a street is messy, dirty, and all the windows are broken, people wouldn’t care if they were to break another window or rob a store. But once the street is clean, the windows are neat, it would seem less natural to go and break a window, as there are no broken windows. It is a community being taken care of and loved. So once people do little things to improve, more and more people will start to follow. This is why a common mantra among activists is; small actions create big change. Even small things can make an impact, so why not choose the right one right now?
