Let's keep it clean!

Garbage everywhere. That’s the first thing you see when you arrive in Tucumán. But why? The garbage collector picks it up every day, maybe there aren’t enough dustbins in the city or people don’t care about keeping the place where they live clean. Well… it’s true, there aren’t enough dustbins in the province. Now, downtown, there are dustbins on every street and corner, but citizens don’t seem to use them. 400 tons of garbage are thrown every day. What can we do to improve this situation and to stop producing such amounts of garbage?

In our school, we are organizing a classifying garbage project to find a solution to the huge amounts of trash thrown daily. When we were told about it, I was surprised and worried, because how are we going to make people classify their garbage, if they don’t throw it in the dustbins, or worst, we don’t classify it in our own school or use the dustbins either.

There are dustbins in the classrooms, fields, bathrooms, in the cafeteria, everywhere, but still, our school is full of trash in every corner. The janitors sweep the candy wrappings and bottles thrown on the grass before every break, when the recess is over, everything is dirty again. Why can’t our school be clean for more than three hours?

I sat in our school’s cafeteria and watched the students. I found: out of five students, only three threw their rubbish in the dustbin. The other two, when I told them they had dropped a paper, continued walking or answered the janitor would clean it later, because it was his/her job. I spent the whole afternoon thinking this situation is absurd and that students don’t care about keeping clean the place where they spend a big part of their day. It’s OUR job to keep the school clean, we can’t expect having people cleaning after ourselves all the time. To avoid our school from looking like a dumpster, we can start using the dustbins, which are essential, and then maybe we can classify our trash, so that we can help with the school’s project; and we can get used to this and practice the garbage classifying in our homes, and at the same time to create a habit for cleanness.

We went to Tafí Del Valle with our project teachers. After visiting a plant where garbage is classified, we were told to clean the route to Tafí. So, we made three or four groups with ten to twelve students each. When we were given plastic bags and gloves we started the assignment. The place seemed clean, but it wasn’t. It was hard work to clean it. And while we were doing it, a driver rolled down the window of his car and threw a piece of paper, we were cleaning and he kept contaminating. He saw us and he didn’t care. We filled all the plastic bags and we couldn’t fish, there weren’t enough bags for us to clean all the garbage.

These examples show there are lots of ways to improve our life style. But if we want to change, we just have to start somehow. When I see someone throw garbage anywhere but in a dustbin I let that person know. And that’s what we should do, so we can become aware and then, change our habits; it’s not that hard to get used to clean, and it is very nice to live in a clean place too. Plus there are lots of things to be done and help keeping the place where we live dirt free. We can start using the dustbins, and then maybe even classify our wastes and stop producing such amounts of it.

These pictures were taken in our school, they clearly show it’s full of trash in every corner.

These are pictures of one of the groups cleaning the route to Tafí.

This is where we had to clean, it looks clean, but it was full of garbage.

By:
Luciana Arena, 3rd polimodal


For more information about the school project read the article written by Adolfina Paz and Daniela Calvo.