For the majority of Cambodian people there is no rubbish collection program and no education on littering or its effects on health and the environment.

The simple act of dropping rubbish is perfectly normal and picking it up a foreign concept.   It's easy to sit back and say this problem should be simple to fix, and yet when I think about my home country Australia and the amount of money spent on education and community awareness and the incredible work undertaken through Clean Up Australia I realise it wasn't that long ago that Australia had a similar attitude.

Unfortunately the Cambodian government does not have the resources to run multi million dollar advertising campaigns to educate a country and change peoples attitudes around rubbish and so it comes back to small steps.

Through our Treak Village Committee we have started the long process of educating families about the need for rubbish collection and the benefits for their households and The Village.  Rice for Rubbish was the kick off to a much larger program aimed to provide an ongoing rubbish collection program within the village.  You can read more about this under our rubbish collection program.

Rice for Rubbish was held on November 2nd 2009.  Over 100 families from Treak Village registered for the day and participants included the young and the old.  Rice bags full of rubbish were carried in on bicycles or in the arms of young kids.  The day required families to collect Non Bio Degradable rubbish from the village and return the bags to our pick up location.   For every one full rice bag of rubbish collected families received 2kg of rice.  Our team helped families along the way and plastic bags were collected from trees, drains and the roadside.

To formalise the proceedings the Deputy Minister for the Environment and the head of GAEA participated in the award ceremony and helped provide additional education to participants.  GAEA provided all the collection for free and a very large truck was required to remove the mountain of rubbish collected.