Sometimes people push them over or mark them with words and pictures. The cans also break a lot, requiring repairs. The current trash cans open too widely, they say, permitting people to reach in. Officials decided it was time to replace the more than 3,000 cans that have served the city’s streets for almost 20 years.

San Francisco began its search for the perfect public trash can in 2018. One of the trash cans under consideration cost more than $20,000 and took four years to make. It also is considering a treatment plant, and working on upstream dams where rainwater can be captured and stored during the monsoon season and released during the dry months to flush the river, moving the waste downstream from Kathmandu.Officials in San Francisco are asking the public to help choose a waste container among several models proposed for mass deployment in the California city. Niranjan Shrestha / APĪs for the sewage, according to Kharel, the committee is working on several projects including the construction of canals and pipes, built parallel to the river, to connect to sewer lines and prevent their waste from reaching the Bagmati. Men participate in a cleanup effort for the Bagmati River in Kathmandu. In addition, many thousands of people have built huts, shacks and brick homes illegally along the river and refuse to leave.

But the pickup efforts admittedly fall short of perfection, in part since frequent disruptions to trash collection services encourage more dumping than they can keep up with. Kharel said that over the years the campaign has succeeded in collecting about 80% of garbage along the riverbank, recovering all sorts of refuse from decaying animals to even, shockingly, the bodies of dead babies dumped there.

She volunteers her time not only for cleanup duty but to raise awareness among the population about avoiding pollution. There almost every weekend is Mala Kharel, an executive member of the governmental High Powered Committee for Integrated Development of the Bagmati Civilization, which was set up to help clean up the river. Among those initiatives, every Saturday for the past seven years hundreds of volunteers have gathered in Kathmandu to pick up garbage and remove trash from the Bagmati. Indeed, there have been efforts by both private volunteers and the government to clean up the river. “Not that there has not been any efforts, there have been several cleaning campaigns, but there are more people dirtying it. “I now have serious doubt that it will be cleaned in my lifetime,” Lama said. Bubbles form from the polluted water of the Bagmati River as it is processed at the Guheswori Wastewater Treatment Plant. Today that feels like a long-ago dream dashed by decades of dumping human waste and refuse, and one she doesn’t expect to see again anytime soon. The river is significant to Buddhists, too, many of whom cremate bodies on the Bagmati’s banks.īorn and raised next to the Bagmati, Lama recalled using its waters for cooking, bathing, washing and even drinking. People have also traditionally collected river water to sprinkle on their homes to purify them. During Teej, married women come to pray for the health and prosperity of their husbands, and single women, to find a good one. Visitors also wade in during the festival of Chhath, praying to the sun god Surya. Women dip in the river to wash away sins during Rishipanchami, a day for worship of the seven sages revered as enlightened beings guiding humanity through the ages. Hindus flock to the riverbanks in Kathmandu to worship at shrines and celebrate festivals. The sprawling complex comprises a golden-roofed main temple dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva, surrounded by hundreds of smaller ones. In the capital, the Bagmati’s sludge oozes past several sacred sites, including the Pashupatinath Temple, declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1979. Trash sits in the Bagmati River as it flows in Kathmandu, Nepal. Tainted by garbage and raw sewage that is dumped directly into the waterway, Nepal’s holiest river has deteriorated so greatly that today it is also the country’s most polluted, dramatically altering how the city of about 3 million interacts with the Bagmati on daily, cultural and spiritual levels.

Trash it pictures