Dirty old towns. By Flavie CHAZEAU & Jean-Baptiste PEYRAT

Rubbish (i.e. not very good!) management...

Belching trashcans

Rubbish management is very important in a city; a dirty city is unpleasant for the people who work and live in it. Holidaymakers won’t be interested in visiting a city which is not clean; cities will then become poorer if they are not kept tidy.

Both pictures are about how rubbish is managed in cities. The color picture illustrates the problem, and the black and white one the solution.

The top picture was taken during my holidays in Naples (Italy) last October. I’ve enhanced the colors of the pile of rubbish to highlight the different types of waste (plastic bags, etc.) and also to show the fact that it is unpleasant to see. The colors don’t look natural and they contrast with the garden behind. Moreover, the low camera angle shows up the large quantity of rubbish. The smell was very bad. It was a sunny afternoon (strangely, the street lamps were on). The large plastic containers were almost completely covered over in trash. Behind, the garden was deserted, probably because of the smell. This city’s waste management is not, apparently, very efficient! This picture makes us think about how to improve our environment…

The second picture was taken on a Sunday in early afternoon in a street of no particular interest near my house. The choice of black and white is to signify the seriousness of the subject. The bins are nicely lined up, standing in front of a residential area. The rubbish is sorted by type. The weather was sunny and mild. They was nobody in the street. At the moment the picture was taken I could hear birds and the noise of people nearby. The unpleasant smell was of rotting food. Otherwise, it was interesting to see the attempt to impose order on the potential mess. We French like to impose order and we tend to respect our environment. In France, it is compulsory to sort rubbish; every house needs to have at least two bins (one green and one yellow) and you can have a third (brown) one too. The dustmen pick up the trash to be recycled every two weeks. This recycling system is good from an economic, environmental, and social point of view.

The first photo shows the chaos when rubbish is no longer managed properly; it contrasts with the second one which shows relatively good urban waste management and the resulting cleanliness.

Waste bins are present in different places in the city, mostly near living areas. The bins are made available to all the citizens but some people don’t use them correctly; they do not bother to sort their rubbish. The cleanness of cities depends on citizens but also on the dustmen; when the garbage collectors go on strike (as was the case in my holiday photo), the city becomes very dirty and the citizen cannot do anything about it...