Litterbugs

One of my pet peeves is littering. I cannot understand how people just drop their rubbish anywhere they like and probably expect other people to pick up after them. Firstly, the rubbish harms the environment and makes the place dirty and unhygienic. One of the worst cases of littering I have seen is when a mother asks her young daughter to throw a piece of tissue paper on the ground blatantly in public. I wonder if that is the way how many people were brought up to have such disregard and disrespect for the environment that we all live in. Maybe in a society like Singapore where typically both parents are working, many Singaporeans were brought up with maids (or domestic helpers as they are commonly referred to as now) and have this mentality that their maids will pick up after them?

A survey by NEA (National Environment Agency) revealed that 1 in 4 people would litter if they knew they could get away with it and a New council to tackle filthy toilets and littering has been set up as reported by Yahoo! news. The new Public Hygiene Council would improve future cleanliness campaigns and plans to move away from the "top-down approach of the past" by making use of modern social media for public education. Council chairman Liak Teng Lit mentioned that residents should not rely on professional cleaners but instead, help to clean up the country they live in, and commented “We have a First World country's infrastructure but we look like a Third World country sometimes.”

In Japan, after eating in fast food restaurant, diners clean up after themselves and take their trays to the bin to empty their rubbish according to the type (paper, plastic, etc). There is a culture where the people generally do not litter and the streets are clean. Singaporeans really need to kick the bad habit of littering.