Scenes from city life

One of the ways I spread the word about recycling street litter (at present in Cardiff, it all goes into landfill) is to talk to people who ask me what the hell I'm up to. This usually happens once or twice over the hour or so it takes to fill my green sack with about 10kg of cans, glass and plastic bottles.


Today a man came up to me and we chatted about the state of litter in our city. As it happened I was in a particularly rich ground for my work, a place where many Bulgarian Roma Gypsies congregate. He told me how the council had housed them close to his own residence, and how racism is not confined to indigenous white folk. The Bulgars seem to have their own prejudices, and have taken against the handful of Pakistanis who also live in that area. These Pakistanis, who have lived in Cardiff for more than thirty years, have been targeted for abuse and malicious damage to their properties, abusive graffiti  daubed on their walls ("Pakis go home" is one example) and garden fences torn down. And according to my informant, it is the Roma who are responsible.


I am aware that recent immigrants to our city are responsible (though not solely; students also seem to be major offenders) for a lot of the recyclable waste which appears on our streets. The problem is that outside the sophisticated states of western Europe, there is no culture of recycling or even keeping street litter down to a minimum. A programme of education needs to be launched, explaining how we like to do things in Britain. Put a little more bluntly, we could say:
"You're here now, and we do things differently from the way you do at home. If you want to be accepted here, adapt to our ways, just as we would do if were in your country."


But what about those students, and all the other Brits who care little for recycling or litter? To them I would say that littering is a spiritual issue; that your habits on the street say a lot about how much you care for your neighbour- and yourself. If you care for your community you will recycle and you won't drop litter- it may sound odd, but at its core it is a thing of the heart.