A special visit to Kansai University: How can we overcome the social stigma of working with trash?

 It was a real pleasure to be invited to Prof. Meli’s class on Eco-Criticism last Tuesday morning at Kansai University. If you’re reading this as a student in that class, thank you all for your participation. It was the first time that I’ve had the chance to teach a university class about trash, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Here in this blog post I want to share some of the information that I found in preparing for the class, and to ask you a question for discussion online.

First, here is the PBS article with the video that we watched together in class. It describes San Francisco’s trash policy and efforts to become a “Zero Waste city”. In the video, you’ll read and hear about the private company that manages the city’s waste, recycling, and landfill, called Recology. Try visiting their website and see how they’re trying to change people’s perception about trash and recycling.

Actually, changing people’s thinking about trash is the topic that I wanted to discuss more in class, but didn’t have time. I mentioned the Japanese NPO Greenbird that I discovered recently, and found SmileStyle and other articles like this and this online as well. In the San Francisco Bay Area of California, many groups organize to clean up trash, and sometimes you can see articles about dedicated individuals who volunteer by themselves. For example, Beverly Knight is an individual volunteer featured in a local newspaper, and ZeroTrash.org is a group that works in several places in California.

Still, raising consciousness about reducing trash and living in a clean environment is difficult work and, I think, there is a significant social stigma attached to the act of cleaning up trash. As I have volunteered with a few friends for several years cleaning trash from the streets of San Francisco and Berkeley, this is one of the main obstacles for me: it’s difficult to explain to my family, friends, co-workers and others that one of my hobbies, and one of my new social identities, is being a “trash guy” who takes pleasure in cleaning the streets. To illustrate this difficulty, in Prof. Meli’s class I handed out copies of this blog post; there I described my experience one day in San Francisco, when I saw a bunch of trash on the street, but still couldn’t move myself to clean it up in front of a group of strangers.

If you have time, please read over the blog post and think about whether or not you’ve ever experienced a similar dilemma of overcoming social stigma. Your experience might be about cleaning up trash, or any kind of social or environmental action that you know is the right thing to do, but that people might look down upon.

• What was your dilemma, and how did you overcome it? Or were you not able to overcome it? 
• Why or why not? 
• What does your dilemma show us about social norms, environmental ethics, and/or cultural differences? 

Please feel welcome to comment here in a few sentences, in English and/or Japanese. I’ll be happy to read about your experiences, and will comment back to you from my home in the U.S.

Thanks, everyone!

Dave