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Solving Cambodia's Plastic Problem Seen as Key to Minimizing Waste

Khan Sokummono

   PHNOM PENH - Lang Teng and his wife Him Chan Ouen have sold vegetables
   for more than four decades. They own two stalls totaling four meters
   square in the Boeng Keng Kong market, where shoppers can get a haircut
   or purchase housewares on the way to buying groceries for the day's
   meals.
   Lang Teng opened his business in Phnom Penh not long after the
   murderous [1]Khmer Rouge rule ended in 1979.
   Today he remembers how shoppers arrived at the market back then, each
   with an empty basket. They moved from stall to stall, buying
   basics--vegetables, meat, fish, eggs--and tucking purchases into the
   baskets that always seemed to have room for another item.

   Until the late 1990s, Lang Teng said vendors wrapped items in "leaves
   like banana leaves, [and] water hyacinth strings. Now, we don't see
   that anymore."
   Today, people go to the market without baskets and return home with
   food wrapped in plastic carried in plastic bags. Even big blocks of ice
   are protected in plastic,
   a big change from the traditional way of tying up ice blocks with water
   hyacinth strings to carry them.
   Cambodians of Lang Teng's basket-carrying generation remember routinely
   living a life that produced little to no waste. With a [2]per capita
   income of $103, they had little disposable income and weren't big
   consumers. What they had, they used until it wore out, then repurposed
   whatever remained. Ahead of the trend, they lived a zero-waste life.
   The Zero Waste International Alliance [3]defines it as "the
   conservation of all resources by means of responsible production,
   consumption, reuse, and recovery of products, packaging, and materials
   without burning and with no discharges to land, water, or air that
   threaten the environment or human health."
   People in Cambodia's capital city of Phnom Penh produce about 3,000
   metric tons of solid waste every day. Nearly 60 percent of municipal
   solid waste comes from households, followed by hotels and guesthouses
   (16.7%), restaurants (13.8%), markets (7.5%), to shops (5.4%) and
   offices (1.4%), according to a 2016-2018 [4]study by the United Nations
   Environment Program.

   It is overwhelming, and after food waste (63.3%), plastic is the
   biggest category (15.5%), followed by grass and wood (6.8%), and paper
   and cardboard (6.4%), according to a September 2019 [5]overview.

References

   1. https://projects.voanews.com/cambodia-election-2018/english/biography/pol-pot.html
   2. https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/cambodia
   3. http://zwia.org/zero-waste-definition/?fbclid=IwAR2KytOtIeodeSQQYRVuNj5lm5FACuMb6xoQsAoLHKgJTQ564en8ZFy_Tik
   4. https://www.ccet.jp/sites/default/files/2018-07/State%20of%20Waste%20Management%20in%20Phnom%20Penh%2C%20Cambodia%20_web.pdf
   5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20813763

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