Trash

Trash in Mongolia is an interesting phenomenon, as in there is a lot of trash and not many people. For a country with one of the lowest population densities in the world, there sure is a lot of trash. Walking out of a Delguur you see Mongolians unwrap their candy or ice cream and nonchalantly toss the wrapper on the ground. They have no concept of littering. In America you can be fined and put in jail for it, but here it is the status quo.
Recently this problem has come closer to home for me. The kid who lives in the apartment next door has started a new game of throwing trash on my balcony. I thought we were sort of friends. A few times I’ve been out on my balcony hanging up my laundry to dry, and he pops his head out his window and says “Hello” to me. I even asked him what his name was one day, and he blurted it out and quickly retracted his head. But lately, his new favorite game is throwing things on my balcony. Maybe it’s just the wind, because a lot of people in my apartment building just throw their trash off their balcony. I even do the same, with food scraps. There are several stray dogs that hang out behind the building just waiting for such events, and I figure they are going to get it one way or another, so why let it rot in my trash can and stink up my apartment? It’s better than beating them off when they smell meat scraps in my “trash bag” (aka plastic shopping bag that I PAY for at the grocery store when I buy food).
In Mongolia the most common way to get rid of trash is by burning it. In fact, that is the best way here. They don’t have landfills. The hills around cities, such as UB and Darkhan, literally sparkle with glass shards. When I first came to Mongolia and we were driving from UB to Darkhan I was quite confused as to why the hills were sparkling, but quickly figured it out. If you live in a house or a ger, you burn your trash in a metal barrel in your hashaa. Or maybe you just take it over the nearest hill. If you live in an apartment, you put your trash in a “dumpster,” where the dogs have their way with it, and then it is periodically burned. The smell of burning trash permeates the air. Sometimes I have to take a different way home from work to avoid walking through the smoke cloud of a burning dumpster.
Surprisingly, UB is one of the cleanest place I have been in Mongolia. Cleanest as far as trash. In UB they hire people to clean up the trash and with nearly half the population living there, if they didn’t they would be in big trouble pretty quickly.
I think the whole trash issue stems from the fact that it wasn’t too long ago when nearly all household waste was biodegradable. Nomads didn’t need to worry too much about just leaving trash wherever it lay, something would eat it. The prevalence of plastic packaging is a relatively new thing here, and children aren’t educated about the effects of littering. They don’t know it’s bad, and they don’t seem to mind plastic wrappers marring their otherwise beautiful surroundings. Another problem is that there just aren’t public trash cans. They are extremely rare. The only ones I’ve seen in Tsetserleg are two Penguin-shaped receptacles in front of the post office. The only time I have seen them used in any way is when kids push them to make them swing back and forth.
Part of the reason for the rampant littering may have to do with the fact that, in Mongolia, you don’t clean up after yourself. Unless you are in your own house, in which case it must be kept pristine. It is considered extremely rude to host guests when you house is dirty, a dirty floor is the utmost of disrespectful behavior. And, in Mongolia, guests are frequently unannounced. But if you are in someone else’s house, you never clean up after yourself. You leave your tea cup, your candy wrappers, and dirty plates where they lie. Even at work we have a woman whose job is to clean up after us and clean the office, who comes around to our desks and picks up our coffee mugs to wash them, and any candy wrappers. The first day I worked, we had a coffee break and after I had finished my coffee I asked where I should put my cup. I was told to leave it, that the cleaning lady would take care of it. As an American who is taught to, at least, strongly offer to help clean up, it’s strange to just leave things. And I guess, with so few people and such a big country, the ground is “someone else’s problem.”