It's not just Asia. Africa and Latin America are much the same. Curiously, Rwanda is a notable exception* - their authoritarian leader decided to spend a lot of manpower to keep everything clean, and I think there are also heavy fines for littering and dumping garbage.

* notable because usually the correlation is with income/culture, but Rwanda is not rich nor much different culturally from neighbouring trash-inundated countries.

Costa Rica is also a notable exception. People there are obsessed with keeping stuff clean and protecting wildlife, because I think they understand how much their livelihood depends on tourism. It’s a huge difference between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, even though culturally the countries are very similar otherwise.

They burn trash and toilet paper in the ditch beside the road in Guanacaste. To be fair, the roads aren't paved, and there are no gas stations or infrastructure. Yes, ecotourism is big in Costa Rica, but they aren't perfect either. Maybe only in the touristy areas....

I have to admit that I didn’t get to far out into the country but even “touristy” parts of other Central American countries are full of garbage — the beaches and everything.

Mandela wrote about this back in 1994 https://books.google.se/books?id=_ewvL93kFx4C&printsec=front...

But that is South Africa, not really a poor African nation.

You most likely only start to care about your surroundings when you exceed a certain income treshold. Below that, you’re just too occupied with bare survival.

This reminds me of the Summer's memo [0]:

This does not even follow from the parent comment. I quote:

" it's not only the very poor, it's also in front or in gardens of villa's in those countries. "

I live in Panama, which might have higher per capita GDP than some of those countries, but it still has high income inequality. I have been to neighborhoods with small houses, no glass windows, and no painted walls, all markers of low income, given the somewhat americanized consumption habits of the middle class population. The worst you would see is that they burn their trash, because no one is coming to pick it. They have gardens will plants, both for food and decoration. People with higher income just buy more land, a grass mower, and irrigate their grass in the dry season. So, I see this behavior as a matter culture. Clearly in neither case are people "too occupied with bare survival" but neither has a cold-minded science-based idea of what it means to care for one's surroundings.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo

This is just using being "poor" to make excuses for bad behaviors. It's such a common occurrence in the West that people don't even think whether it is valid or not. It doesn't take copious amounts of money to not litter. It's an attitude. When I visited Vietnam my local friends kept their homes spotless, but when we were in hotels they would literally drop trash on the floor of the room even though there was a waste basket less than a meter away.Poor people don't need to litter to survive and prosper. Good waste management/sanitation habits improves lives in plenty of ways and it doesn't require wealth do to it.. It's attitudinal, not a matter of survival.

You have to be able to afford to buy trash bags if you want to keep your trash from being in "a pile" and then what do you do with all these bags of trash? If your whole community is too poor to afford a garbage truck then who is coming 'round to pick up the garbage? Of course poor people in underserved communities could just haul their own trash to the "local pile", but who has time to do that when you're working to get food on the table?

Your post to me is quite strange because it describes a problem that has a certain floor on poverty, but then claims those being spoken about live below that floor. If you have plastic bottles, cans, and etc. you are not so poor as to be unable to manage your waste. The hyper impoverished people you describe, subsistence farmers, have compost, not non-biodegradable and unburnable waste.

I've never been to Vietnam and I wasn't attempting to describe any specific people. I was just addressing the idea that being poor is not a condition that might raise the bar for disposing of one's trash "properly" (or, for that matter, doing almost anything else). Where I live I spend $52 a month to have my trash picked up (and it just went up to $54). I can totally imagine a person or family who can afford to buy some things made of plastic (pretty much one of the cheapest materials in the world) but who would still be strained by an extra $50 obligation. Or people who can afford plastic but still live in a community that cannot afford to offer this service. I've seen photos of people living in mud and straw huts without windows or running water wearing Nikes so I suspect access to industrialized waste might be more accessible than you think.

And I'm not saying even the poorest individual can't handle their own waste, I'm just positing that the effort required to do so is inversely correlated with income.

If anything I'd prefer if people were more careless with their trash in the "nice" places since this is where most of the people responsible for designing and producing this stuff tend to live and under our current arrangement these minds are somewhat insulated from the actual impact of producing long-lived objects of marginal utility.

I get where you're coming from, but it wouldn't be $50/mo. These costs adjust with the cost of labor and land and so on. In the US the median household income is around $60,000/year. People pay ~$600/year for trash collection, or about 1% of the median income. In Vietnam, for example, the average annual income is in the area of $5,000/year (more in cities like Hanoi and HCMC, less in rural areas.) 1% of $5,000/year would be about $50/year, or $4-5/mo. People who are buying products that have the kind of waste byproducts that end up as litter will be able to afford paying an extra $5/month.

I'll ask my friend what they pay for trash pickup. I'm sure there must be something because they didn't have huge piles of trash around their home.

I agree and find that logical, but I saw many villas with expensive western cars in front that had heaps of plastics in front and in the garden. Those people seem to not be struggling with survival but just don't care?

I've noticed rich people in poor countries are very aware of what is not becoming of them. They were probably waiting for some poor person to come work for a few dollars a day to come do the jobs beneath them.

I've seen it with the wife's family (middle class South American). They are used to my strange ways now, but they were shocked when they saw me washing the car, doing the gardening, tidying the yard, "why are you doing that, you have money, just pay someone".

It may be the fact that, even if you tidy up your yard, as soon as you step out of the premise, you're in garbage land - if you value beauty, you will be depressed anyway. Plus, no doubt it's partially cultural i.e. a lot of these well-off people grew up poor, so it's in their values to not care about the beauty too much (they were raised by their poor parents to focus on survival, and that's what they did for their whole life until they became well off). Their children may be different though, esp. if they go to an university in a cleaner city.

Cultural inertia.

People don't just suddenly change their habits because they have more money. I'm in Taiwan and see rich people live with what seems like poor people habits all the time. Everyone is simply used to it and sees it as normal.

I think attitude changes are more likely a result of education and the opinions and behavior of your peers. Limited contact with other cultures and ideas keeps habits and concepts of normalcy where they are.

That may be true, but plenty of countries where the majority have secured a middle class existence still don’t care about the trash everywhere.

Hell, in the US 50 years ago it wasn’t that uncommon to find trash everywhere.

It may be related to wealth, but it has to be something else as well.