The recycling bins that didn't work before are back in Da Nang

About a year ago, the part of Da Nang that I live in started seeing a bunch of recycling drop off centers appear on the streets. At first I was excited that Da Nang was doing something to tackle their very real pollution problem but I had my doubts that they really meant to do anything about it. My suspicions were confirmed when I went to other parts of town where there are no tourists and not a single one of these recycling centers existed. This was purely public relations and trying to convince tourists that this city is actually concerned about the environment. Apparently they are not.

The bins themselves were not used properly, people were just putting whatever in each of the various compartments, and the bins were poorly constructed and fell apart. Others were stolen presumably to be sold for scrap, which is ironic because people were recycling the recycling bins.

This is the state of the original ones today.

They aren't used by anyone, they are all vandalized, and some of them are simply lying on their sides on the ground. Originally, they had locks on them to prevent theft by people who wander the streets looking for recyclables to sell. I always thought this was quite cruel because the people that are digging through trash cans looking to make a bit of money are the people that need access to this the most. It probably would have been beneficial to just let them have access to the bins because I never noticed any governmental entity ever coming to pick anything up out of these things and there were rumors that when they were emptied, it was done in the middle of the night and all the contents were simply poured in with any other regular garbage.

The system clearly didn't work, if it was ever intended to in the first place.

In the past week the city has doubled down on this failed venture, and put NEW recycling bins around the same neighborhood where the process didn't succeed.

Once again it is essentially the same process and I give it a week before all of these are misused, neglected, or stolen. The new ones are of even lower quality than the first ones. I tried to pick it up just to see if I could and i was able to do so easily. Now that we are in monsoon season, these will almost certainly be blown over as well.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Since this country and city are already rather desperately poor, I can't even imagine the thinking that goes into bothering to spend money on this at all.