Bags Bags And More Bags

Both Cambodians and Thais are plastic bag crazy. Everything you buy has 2 or 3 bags, they have a plastic bag for this a plastic bag for that. If you go and buy som tum (papaya salad) on the street for 25 baht you get a clear plastic bag for the som tum, you get a smaller plastic bag for the kaow nee-owe (sticky rice) plus you get a third big white bag to carry everything in. If you go to buy some sautee moo (pork) on the street, you get one bag for the pork, one for or two more for the various sauces and then a 3rd to carry everything else.

Styrofoam is also a big seller here,  styrofoam containers of all kinds are used for all kinds of foods sold on the streets. You get styrofoam this and styrofoam container that  all carried in/with multiple plastic bags.

When I was in Poipet I saw the end game for these bags, they were strewn all over the place, on the street, in the gutters, half burried in the mud, flying through the air.  In Klong Toey slum, I saw all the used plastic bags and styrofoam containers floating down the canal, a floating smelly mess.

How long does this stuff last before it decomposes? In the old Thai way food was often stored in banana or other kinds of leaves and tied up with strings made from plants all of that stuff decomposed naturally. Now its all stryrafoam, plastic bags and elastics, that seem to never disappear.

I photographed children in Poipet living in shacks next to a field of this type of garbage, thousands and thousands of plastic bags and styrofoam containers. Going back to the old ways where storage containers decomposed naturally was a better way to do things, sometimes progress is not progress.