I doubt if there’s ANY PUBLIC PLACE outdoors in the Philippines where there’s no rubbish, trash, litter, you name it.
Look around you. Well, not right now. Wait until you get somewhere you can’t afford to bring out your laptop. When you do get to look around, notice what makes everything untidy. You can’t miss it.
Imagine your feet and legs submerged in all that garbage juice.
It’s the bits of trash, the remnants of what people consume, lying around where they shouldn’t be. Of course this is all prior to these same bits of rubbish clogging drains everywhere after rainfall. Not only do we have poor drainage systems, the garbage we see around us everyday collects to get in the way of ridding the streets of floodwater fast enough.
In a past blog post entitled Littering: The Ultimate Convenience, I listed the things I remember encountering just about everywhere, as litter.
Here’s the math. Between these two equivalent quantities of shampoo, which one generates more clutter? This?
Or this?
Imagine the tingi and “tipid pack” waste packaging generated by many millions of Pinoys who buy small and end up replenishing often. Garbage multiplies quite quickly that way. And too many Pinoys throw rubbish away just about anywhere, too! No wonder the drains are clogged.
See? Sachets, sachets, sachet, sachets, and more sachets! I don’t think I’m alone in observing that we’re a nation buried in tingi packaging. Ah, the Philippines – populated by about 90 million, mostly low-income Pinoys who buy small quantities in sachets because they can’t afford bigger packs.
And here’s a mystery for you: When you buy a sachet of this and that, and a sachet of everything else day after day, aren’t you paying more for packaging than the product it contains? Don’t products cost less per unit weight or volume when bought in larger quantities?
Wow. A poor sweatshop laborer, who could only afford small quantities of shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste and whatever, might be spending more money on the same quantity of product that a middle class office worker buys, only because the former buys them in small quantities all the time.
Think about it. I’m sure it’s only standard business practice that the cost of packaging is recouped from consumers, which means the manufacturer won’t sell the products at a loss.
It’s a double whammy for low-income Pinoys who buy small every time. For the sake of not having those terrible floods, and for the families of lower income brackets not to spend so much money on the packaging, we’ve got to do away with our tingi economy somehow.
