IDFC2019
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Environment
There are many types of environmental issues such as deforestation, industrial pollution, mass consumption and so on. Each country has it's own environmental issues. Although Japan and Myanmar have the same goal of sustainability in the field of environment, they have different environmental issues to solve. Is Myanmar going to trace the same history to Japan as the string of environmental issues had begun since Meiji Restoration? In IDFC2019, we are going to focus on environmental issues of city and our daily lives. We need to know what is actually happening in Myanmar where there is huge population growth in urban area and in Japan which tries hard to create recycling society.
Places we visited
Clean Days Ahead
In Japan, people always separate garbage in such a way that the garbage is segregated as 5 or more types like burnable garbage, non-burnable garbage,cans, bottles or PET bottles, paper and oversized garbage. Segregated wastes are collected depending on the day of the week. People have to dispose garbage on the decided day of the week. For instance, it is only allowed to throw plastic wastes on Monday. What is more, if we want to throw big items such as the old mattress, we have to pay charges depending on the size of the waste.
Alternatively, in Myanmar, separating garbage is not thorough. There are some trash bins colored orange, but those bins are filled with sundry garbage, kind of organic, non-organic, plastic, cans, and so forth. People living in Yangon require to use two different coloured bags for “wet” and “dry” waste products. Blue bags are used for wet waste, including food, flowers and other kitchen refuse. Green bags are to put dry waste. It includes wooden products, glass, bottles and plastics. Yet, that measure isn't carried out thoroughly either. The rubbish collection day is not fixed, and many local people are lack of awareness in environmental problems.
Recycling is one of the processes from 3Rs and we can get many advantages and benefits from doing it. Recycling helps to prevent the pollutions by reducing the need to collect new raw materials. There is no doubt that it conserves natural resources such as timber, water and minerals. Energy usage is also saved by doing recycling so it can reduce the emission of greenhouse gases which helps to tackle the climate change. It will also reduce the area of waste products in landfills. Hence, it’s obvious that recycling can make a better environment for a better future.
As urbanization is growing rapidly, we should pay attention to preserve cities’ heritage. In Yangon, there is a NGO called Doh Eain which is trying to improve public spaces by creating gardens in alleyways. By doing so, they tend to make sure that Yangon is livable, enjoyable and sustainable.
However, there are some challenges and problems in ensuring the sustainability of this alley garden project. The main concern is people’s behaviors (i.e. they still throw the garbage, spit the betel on the decorated walls). In addition to this, animals’ poops, the very old buildings’ structures and the weather become the obstacles in achieving the success of the project.
The more increase in the world population, the more pollutions there will be. Therefore, it is important for everyone to have environmental awareness and take sudden actions. Everyone needs to take care of his responsibility in carrying out the reservation of the environment individually. Starting from this individual level, one can spread this to the surroundings and to the community level. By doing the step-by-step process, we can promote the awareness to the national level in order that every single person can be able to participate in the process of protecting our environment.
GroupB: Kazuhiro Kuroda, Rie Ozaki, Than Zin Sann, Hein Htet Lin, Wai Lwin Kyaw
Comparison of garbage situation
Nowadays, all human beings around the world are facing environmental problems; pollution, global warming, ozone depletion, depletion of natural resources and overpopulation. Moreover, waste disposal is being a global problem because population continues to grow day by day. Even though the impact of waste problem is global, we have to focus on local level where garages are produced. This time, we try to compare the situation between Japan and Myanmar.
At first, let’s overview the current situation in both countries. In Japan, the percentage of recycling is about 80% which is highest in the world. Meanwhile, the amount of garbage is about 4.4 million per year and it is worst in developed country. There is no accurate statistics about waste management in whole Myanmar but in Yangon 1,690 tons wastes in generated per day. Because the population in Yangon is significantly increasing, the amount of wastes are expected to be increased too.
In japan waste management such as recycling and collecting wastes is in charge of by city government. In case of Yokohama in Japan, people dispose their wastes at certain time and day depends on the type of their wastes such as burnable garbage, non-burnable garbage, plastic and cans, which is promoted by panphlet. City committee also make an effort to make garbage dump at many point in the city so that people can easily dispose their garbage.On the other hand, waste management in Myanmar has traditionally been the responsibility of township and city development committees and wastes collected by respective townships and city development committees are transported to open dumping sites. In Yangon, we can see there is no multiple dump cans which encourage people to separate their garbage and any kinds of garages are collected together. Last year, because of gas caused by un-separated garbage cause fire at Hteinpin, which is one of the landfill in Yangon.
We conducted survey to see difference of education in Myanmar. People who answered the survey was 118 people in total (66 people in Japan, 52 people in Myanmar). Major people were university students and live in city. As our survey, 73.5％ in Myanmar and 90% people in Japan answered they get education which made us a bit surprised because we thought there are less educational opportunities in Myanmar compared to Japan.
However, when we asked how to learn waste problem, we saw the differences. In Japan, they have varieties of opportunities even from elementary school. We got many answered people learned 3R(reduce, reuse and reduce) as a school curriculum. Some answered experience of visiting disposal areas and landfills to know how important separation of waste is. In Myanmar, on the other hand, environmental issue and waste problem are not integrated into school curriculum. It means that people who answered “Yes, I got education about environment” learned by themselves by joining the environmental program or reading the books. When I visited market in Yangon, I met woman who owned the shop. She have to quite her middle school because of financial issue but she learned by herselves about environmental problems. It encourage her to use paper bags not plastic bags. In addition, there is social enterprise named “recyGlo” which try to establish proper waste management system in Yangon cooperating with companies and government.
In conclusion, in regards with waste management system and education, Japan is more experienced than Myanmar. Meanwhile, as a global citizen, we have to improve awareness and make an action from the small step in which nationality doesn’t really matter. At last, here is the answers of “ what environment means to you?”
