Trash Day Azerbaijan

Azerbaijani's Trash Truck-Tractor

Sorry this is so late but I wanted to have a picture of the Trash Tractor and they are only around very early in the morning.  And of course they are never there when you want them but I did manage to get this as he was speeding pass me one morning!! At home (in America) we usually have three trash bins.  One is for recycling, one for leaves; branches compose material and then one for trash.  The truck comes by and with its automatic hooks pick up the bins and tosses them into the truck. In Azerbaijan regions it is a tad bit different.  In the villages, there is no trash pickup so everyone burns everything in their back yard.  In the city, the trash is put on the curb either in plastic bags or buckets and there is no such thing as recycling.  Men and women have small brooms and dust pans which they are sweeping and running after a tractor that is pulling a trailer and dumping the trash in back of it (see above).  People here are not environmental thinker.  In parks they do have small trash bins but most of the time, most people just throw their litter on the ground without much thought to what happens or they may think it will magically disappear?  I have given a few lessons on littering and I think it did make an impact on my students.  Do you know that aluminum cans take 1 million years to decompose?  So it is important to recycle them. Cigarette butts take 12 years to decompose and candy wrappers take 200 (yes 200) years to decompose. And both wrappers and butts cannot be recycle or reused, so I tell my students think about each time you eat candy and throw away that wrapper and each time you see someone throw a cigarette butt down on the ground.  I think I made a point yea!!!  But they learn from their families and peers.  My goal is to just change one person thinking and then you have a ripple effect.  Our summer camp will also address this issue.  One of our PCV’s who works for an organization that is trying to implement some kind of training awareness of the importance of not littering.  On the last day of camp we will go up to the park or forest depending on approval my counterpart gets and we will do some trash cleanup.  I do hope this will make a difference in their thinking and maybe they will encourage their parents not to litter too!!!

 

Life Challenge: A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions... Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.