Reduce? Reuse? Recycle?

Growing up in Minnesota there were four garbages at my house, one normal garbage, one for paper product recycling, another for cans and glass, and another one(implemented recently) for organics-composting. The city comes by once a week or every other week and picks up the trash on certain days. Oh yeah there's also a bag O' plastic bags to take to the grocery store for recycling. This has made me very aware of what products are made of, think. I have carried this with me through life. I was always the psycho roommate yelling to recycle and digging things out of the trash. "Read the bottom it is a number 5 plastic not a number 1 or 2." It seems so simple when you have a few bins in front of you to take 1 extra second to think where to place it. Where it goes after that is another question? My point is that it becomes habit. If the system is there and there is education about it's importance people should conform.














Back to Turkey...The garbage system is this. You fill up a plastic bag from the market(little reusing?) with all your trash. There is no separating. You throw it on the side of the street but only at night. It is rare that there are dumpsters as in the above photo. The city truck comes around every night of the week collecting. The recycling program consists of poor people from the village with their horse and buggies(literally above) sorting through the trash taking what glass and metal they can. Then selling it? Where? Maybe with past generations the Turks consumptions levels were low. Now with all these new malls and packaged foods/products modern Turkey needs to make a change. How? I don't think the environment is high on the list right now. Different battles waging.

A dear friend came to visit me in Istanbul last March. We picked her up from the airport, 5 of us crammed into the car plus her three large luggages. A different friend in the front seat had a big box of crap on his lap. We pull over on the side of the highway and they threw the big box out the window and off we went, our load slightly lighter. My dear friend, who knows me so well, just looks at me and says, "Aren't you going to freak out?" I normally would freak out about littering but didn't(I have also been known to go with the flow). She shocked me by calling me out...yeah why didn't I freak out? This is why I am back for round two of "The Turkey" with a less idyllic viewpoint. When I asked my boyfriend later about littering he would say, "We are Turks." I love them but there is a beautiful country here that is getting dirty!