Rainy Day Plastic: POBPhotocontest

There is much to love about the streets of Thailand, with street-food probably being at the top of most people's list. However, think of all those poor vendors in the rainy season when sudden torrential rain can play absolute havoc with your little stall (as well as send all your potential customers scurrying for shelter where they will probably fill themselves up in fastfood shops). In this situation many just pack up and go home accepting that rain means less income. Others stick through it, like this guy in a street market who wraps his stall in plastic sheeting drapped over a large umbrella. Given that most of the rain comes as heavy but passing showers, this is a good option particularly for evening markets which are more likely to catch the rain than in the morning. A relaxed attitude, like his, helps.

This was another version of the same scenario but using more solid plastic sheeting. It probably copes better if the rain comes with wind but does make it harder to see what is actually being sold. Either way I imagine the humidity can get quite high in there.

Is that a multi-use plastic bag (above)? I hope not. This vendor seemed more worried about her hair than the food she was selling but I wonder if the bag eventually got passed on to a customer full of food. Perhaps not, as it was wet.

The food from these stalls will inevitably be sold in plastic bags or polystrene, often both. In bygone times it would have been biodegradable banana-leaf wrappers that could be thrown aside without much concern. Unfortunately this attitude of casually discarding wrappers has been retained into the age of plastic so streets and other roadsides are literally littered with plastic.

There is a recycling industry that's flourishing enough to make it worth some people's time and effort to collect what they can sell to the recyclers. But what they do collect, like with these two on their motorbike, is limited to the higher value items like cardboard and plastic water bottles. The ubiquitous plastic bags that come with street food are not on this list so they end up as an endless problem. And not just as an eyesore.

The all-too-common flash-flooding in Bangkok is almost impossible to avoid. No drainage system could cope with the volume of water that sometimes falls in a short time but it is made much worse by so many plastic bags being discarded with no attempt to find a bin. They get washed down the drains where they are a major cause of blockages that cause floods like the one here. This flood certainly made it tricky for me to catch a bus!

In a way it's a bit like a ghost of plastic past.