When I first arrived in Nepal, I was shocked by the amount of trash in the streets. Trash is actually a big problem in a lot of South Asian countries. It’s often not collected at all; even when it is collected, there are not proper sites to process it, like they have in the United States. The geography then makes the problem even worse. The Himalayan Mountains are the source of many rivers, so when trash gets in the rivers, it pollutes a water source for many mountain communities. Furthermore, these rivers all eventually lead to the ocean. If the rivers are full of trash, then that trash will also end up in the ocean. This saddens me greatly, so I decided to investigate further.
I learned about the need for reliable trash collection and processing in Nepal. While there are garbage collectors in cities of Nepal, collection is not consistent in all parts of a town or city, especially if it is hard to access by road. So, much of the trash still ends up in streams, lakes, parks and streets. In Darjeeling, the town I visited during my first month in Nepal, I saw people just roll their trash down the hillside. And in small villages of Nepal along the trekking routes, where there simply isn't any trash collection, there’s no way of processing all the trash that trekkers leave behind.
