[baolongtrann]

I'm a Viet, born and raised. My country is blessed with incredible scenery, diverse and natural. The coast line is as long as the country itself ffs. Now I won't claim that I'm an avid traveler, but from my limited traveling experience (only been to Australia, Korea, Japan and Hongkong on vacation, nothing too fancy), I have never been to a place that I would rank higher in terms of beautiful, natural scenery.

However, the one thing that always caught me off guard from the few oversea trips that I've taken is that _everything is so clean over there_. That's literally the first thing that I always noticed when I get there and when I came back. Makes me feel sad, envious, and shameful.

[teekert]

Yes, it's a pity, I traveled to Quan Lan Island in 2010, my wife and I thought it would be unspoiled and off track. But the boat there was full of people throwing litter over board, I even saw a lady pull a diaper of a child and throw it overboard without even thinking. The beaches were littered with colorful plastic. (I have a picture on my Nextcloud but no idea how to share it and my wife is very prominent in so I won't but the picture still make me feel sad. Edit, uploaded but only downloadable for 7 days or 100 times apparently (and cropped my wife out): [0])

I also got the feeling that small bays that were labelled as nice in our perhaps a bit dated travel guide were filled with large hotels between the time since they were labeled as such and when we arrived.

Overall though I found Vietnam very, very beautiful indeed and the people were very kind as well (outside the tourist industry at least).

I guess it's an education thing, as kid I constantly heard in school: Plastic stays around for 2500 years! Birds choke on your chewing gum! The hole in the ozone layer is our fault! TBH I felt pretty burdened, sad and responsible by/for it, but I guess it has its advantages.

[0] https://send.firefox.com/download/c48c1add8b2d74a0/#qxQ-qoh-...

[yellowapple]

> Birds choke on your chewing gum!

This is the first I've heard of this one. It sounds reasonable, but something tells me your school was using this as an excuse to keep kids from sticking their gum all over the place ;)

[trickstra]

Western tourist also immediately notice it when they come to SE Asia. It's a pity that this is such a strong memory.

As a Vietnamese local, why do you think the plastic pollution is so widespread here? Sure, everything is packed in plastics, but so is in Japan. Why do people just not think twice about throwing their waste in a ditch or a river or leave their picnic at the beach? Or is most of it coming from the sea? What could change the mentality?

[leejoramo]

As a child growing up in 1970s USA, I remember the vast amount of trash along our roads, city streets, parks and beaches. It was fairly common to see people throw trash out of their car windows.

What changed? I have never studied this, but I know we implemented large scale clean up projects, passed new laws and made a cultural shift in attitudes.

[thaumasiotes]

What changed was the environmentalism movement, usually symbolized by the crying Indian commercial.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CryingIndian

>>>> My guess is it will take another generation for people there to appreciate how blessed they are to live in such surroundings but by then it will unfortunately be too late.

This in the parent comment is strange. It wasn't too late everywhere else, and it obviously won't be too late in Vietnam either. A clean environment is a luxury you can afford when you're rich. Poor places are dirty, but it's not like they can't be cleaned.

[ams6110]

Yes, I was a kid in the 1970s and the anti-littering campaign was pervasive. I was too young to remember/notice the litter itself, but definitely remember the "Crying Indian" commercial, Woodsy Owl[1], and others. You always saw these in the Saturday morning cartoons, in particular.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodsy_Owl

[leejoramo]

Yes, I should have included the rise of the environmental movement. And I came very close to including the crying American Indian ad, it was very impactful on me.

[stefanfisk]

I also remember Sweden being like this until early/mid 90s. The only real change AFAIK was peoples' attitudes, as a result of government campaigns.

Hell, in the 60s you could watch wonderfully informational movies as this on the one and only available TV station https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrcrX9Qaw2o. (skip to 1:15 for the recommended practise of waste removal near the ocean).

[maxxxxx]

Same in Germany. I remember piles of trash at almost every Autobahn stop and people burning piles of trash was normal. I think the willingness to keep the country clean is connected to prosperity. Only when the basic needs are met people care about the environment.

[coconut_crab]

I can think of a few reasons:

- Convenience & economic: one kg of nylon bag costs around 2$, 20~40 times cheaper than biodegradable plastic, and nylon bag are taxed at more than 100%.

- Local market are full of farmers selling their fresh vegetables, poultry or pork. So when I go buy food for my dinner I come back with 3~5 bags, with each ingredients having their own bag. While a visit to supermarket often result in 1 bag for all of those.

- Average Vietnamese simply wasn't taught how precious nature is. Just 30 years ago we were riding on wood gas truck or cars modded to run on kerosene mixed with gasoline. There is a saying "Prosperity brings respect" (roughly translated) in Vietnam, and we are still poor and too busy to make more money.

- We simply don't have the facility for classifying trash and recycling/burning them.

[toper-centage]

How do you keep your meat and vegetables in a single bag? It's not impossible to reject bags in the local markets - I do that all the time. But on my travels around SEA but specially Vietnam, I feel tired and hopeless. I saw a lady from a toy shop throw a few batteries away to the curb without giving it a thought.

[mc32]

As an outsider, If I had to guess it would be lack of proper institutionalized waste management; one that’s not rigorously enforced.

In the West in the early 20th century we also had burning heaps of trash in abandoned or empty lots.

[baolongtrann]

> Why do people just not think twice about throwing their waste in a ditch or a river or leave their picnic at the beach?

I think there are two main reasons. First, many people don't have environmental awareness. They weren't taught. That's not to blame them, but it's just a fact. However the new generations are indeed educated on that subject. We were taught to not litter, to pick up the trash, etc. But this is where the second issue lies: when we don't follow the rules, nothing happens. No immediate consequences. Whereas in other developed countries, when people break the rules, they get fined, they get other people looking at them funny. That collective awareness helps enforce the simple rules.

[marapuru]

> However, the one thing that always caught me off guard from the few oversea trips that I've taken is that _everything is so clean over there_. That's literally the first thing that I always noticed when I get there and when I came back. Makes me feel sad, envious, and shameful.

My wife, who is originally from Indonesia, always notices the same thing in The Netherlands. The contrast couldn't be bigger. She also has these feelings of sadness and shame.

[Mediterraneo10]

Yet even in the Netherlands the cleanliness might be a recent thing. I lived in NL some years ago and remember it as the dog-shit-on-the-pavement capital of Western Europe. Only after I left, people tell me, things got stricter.

[theandrewbailey]

> dog-shit-on-the-pavement capital

Oh gosh. The two eternal hazards of my childhood (that my parents would yell at me about) were dog shit and broken glass. I distinctly remember going to a school playground when I was about 6, and wanted to crawl through a plastic tunnel, but didn't when I saw a huge pile of shit in the middle.

Now, pooper scooper laws took care of the former, but people still get drunk off their ass and leave bottles everywhere.

[adventured]

I'm certain they'll get there in time, as part of the development process. Indonesia has grown its economy ten fold in 20 years, a mind-boggling rate of improvement. Just as with China, as they rise they'll have far greater resources available for many other considerations such as preservation of nature and general beautification (which is obviously often expensive, close to a luxury depending on what stage of development you're at). That switch from scarcity to plentifulness, rapidly changes a lot of things in a society usually.

[LeanderK]

> resources available for many other considerations such as preservation of nature and general beautification (which is obviously often expensive, close to a luxury depending on what stage of development you're at)

I am not sure this is true, isn't it that potential for damage to the enviroment (beyond only simple trash) increases with the economic power of the nation and therefore preservation would have to track economic progress?

I would think that preservation efforts would have track economic progress, but the effects lag in time and therefore gets noticed too late and costly renaturation efforts need to happen.

[goda90]

How big is social media there? The #trashtag trend is really awesome, and would be good to get going. It's using people's desire for attention to do some clean up.

[baolongtrann]

Social media, mainly facebook, is absolutely huge over here. I have seen a few popular local #trashtag pictures circling around. We generally catch up with internet trends pretty quickly. I wouldn't be surprised if it made national TV. It's awesome but unfortunately I don't think it would help much in the long run.

[gaongthothuy]

As an American-born Vietnamese person, I'll provide context for other Western readers:

There is no real US substitute I can think of for experiencing living in Vietnam.

I grew up in NoVA, and would go on month-long summer trips to Vietnam with my family to visit relatives. My asian friends from China, India, and the Philippines would go on similar trips with their families too, so we would share stories and commiserate with each other. We joked with the Korean kids how they had it easy, and would tell the White kids how it's like the opposite of 'vacation'.

Living outside Hanoi with my relatives and seeing day-to-day life in Vietnam made me thankful for my Western lifestyle. I was used to the typical US suburban cushiness, and this was like bootcamp: no A/C, no American toilets (only squat ones), less reliable internet, widely varying food standards (having diarrhea in Florida-like weather is awful), and commonplace dirtiness and pollution (imagine NYC before the EPA but more widespread).

Even for me, there would be moments of culture shock seeing street food vendors selling field rats or shop owners dumping loose garbage into alleys. Things you would be shocked to see happen in the US without immediate reprimand and regulation are "just a part of life" in Vietnam. There is a huge cultural disconnect to hurdle between practices that are acceptable in Vietnam vs. the US.

Finally, there is the topic of education. For those asians who came from rural lifestyles not very long ago, education was not widely accessible or particularly advanced (e.g. college-level subject study), thus, many people did not grow up receiving the same learnings. This is where folk beliefs come in and fill the void (i.e. the "old wives tale" equivalent). It's information based on tertiary cause-effect understanding, or explanation derived from non-scientific study. For example, a handful of my older relatives believe that rains causes lice (as in lice spontaneously generate from rain), therefore, keeping your head dry in the rain prevents lice. This is something that could be easily discredited if there was effort put into convincing them otherwise or letting them discover it's not true.

It's really an incredible shame that ignorance, unawareness, and fallaciousness have lead to such a tragedy of animals and environments being destroyed. Vietnam needs more figures to go out into the public and address ass-backwards thinking like drinking bile or eating horns will cure ailments. It's certainly as dumb or dumber than anti-vax stories. Modern medicine is already a solution to many of these "folk cures", with greater efficacy and less harm, yet it's ignored in favor of some random concoction because that's the "traditional way". It makes as much sense as hanging herbs in my doorway to ward off the flu over getting a flu shot.