Singapore is super clean, it is almost unbelievable if you compare Singapore with other countries! Singapore is famous for tis clean public space. While walking through the city however, foreign visitors can’t help but wonder where the trash bins are? There are almost no bins in public areas in Singapore! After eating my buns from the bakery, I have to get rid of 3 tiny plastic bags. I am frequently forced to use my own nice, leather bag as a bin until I finally find a real one. How is it possible to have no littering in a country without a lot of trash bins? According to Clayton & Myers (2009), it is more likely for people to show sustainable behavior if it is convenient and easy to do. This means that the more and the closer the dustbins are, the less people will litter. That is, however, not what is happening in Singapore. Even though trash cans are hard to find, people in Singapore will still barely litter. Does this mean that a lot of people have internalized that littering is not okay, or do external incentives, like punishments, play a big role? That is an interesting unanswered question to me!

Moving up to the next subject, we elaborate on the observation that the streets are very clean, despite of the lack of bins. We can deduce that a lot of waste does end up in trash bins in Singapore. Even though this is necessary for sustainability, we must investigate what happens to this trash afterwards. In 2013, 60% of the garbage has been recycled (Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources and the Ministry of National Development of Singapore, 2014; Singapore Times, 2015). That is an impressive number! If the recycle rates are so high, you would expect that a lot of Singaporean residents recycle. Let’s have a look at the halls of residents of the NTU campus. I have seen a few recycle bins in the halls, but I can’t really remember where they are. There might be a recycle program, but I haven’t seen or heard about it. It appears to be that the 60% recycle rate is not due to a high percentage of people that are recycling, but industries are the main contributors the high recycle rates in Singapore. If you compare the waste of residents and industries, the waste of this first group is almost marginal.

Recycling is very important, but it may be more important to reduce the use of plastic for example. As Gardner and Stern (2002) say, recycling is the best option after prevention. That is where the Singapore packaging agreement focuses on. It is a program to reduce packaging waste in Singapore. The remaining question is, why does everything still come with at least one plastic bag?