Depending on the part of Paris you’re in, Paris is a very
clean or surprisingly dirty city. The
average Parisian—non-immigrant—is concerned with eco-friendly products and good
recycling habits. In immigrant laden
areas of Paris, this is not always the case, though still is for some. Regardless, there are trash recepticals
everywhere throughout Paris, and one sees trashmen going about to collect this trash on a daily basis. The center of
Paris is usually very clean and it’s nearly impossible to find trash on the
ground, though one my find the occasional box filled with empty wine bottles
from the night before, if walking around in the early morning hours. However, cigarette butts are not trash. One cannot regard them as garbage. Given this, cigarette butts line Paris in an
astonishing way. In any given square
foot there are 1-15 cigarette butts in places near where people can sit or
street curbs.
Their trash men are not “underlings” of French society the
way they are in the United States—service jobs where you do your job
unseen. In fact, they talk to and joke
with people on the street as they pass by picking up full trash bags and
replacing them with new bags. People
have conversations with them and they do their job well. Despite relative cleanliness of the
inner-city and the well-doing trashmen, France is not afraid of trash and not
afraid to admit trash/rubbish exists.
Today I walked out onto my street—a nice street in the 6th
arrondisement—to see two LARGE mounds of trash in the middle of the
street. Perhaps the truck broke down,
perhaps that’s how they collect trash (I’ll watch out for this again) but no
one seemed in a rush to move the trash, and people walked past it without the
slightest worry. It was being taken care
of, I imagine.—This is not something you would ever see on an important,
well-to-do street in the United States.
Someone would have complained the second it happened, someone would be
scrambling to get it off the street and out of the area, someone would be
fired. In Paris, it was life as usual,
only a giant mound of trash was accompanying it.
