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From mid October to mid November in 2013, Beijing Xiang Shan Red Leaves Cultural Festival was held as scheduled. Visitors from all around the world came to appreciate the beautiful scenery where “mountains were dyed by red leaves”. However, during this period, lots of cases of littering also came forth, as people disregarded the rules of the garden. This year is the 25th anniversary of Beijing Xiang Shan Red Leaves Cultural Festival. Along with the increase of the number of visitors, the garbage left by visitors also came to a new high. It was reported that on the second weekend since the opening of Red Leaves Cultural Festival, nearly 200,000 visitors climbed up the mountain to admire the red leaves. Consequently, the workload of cleaning staff increased a lot. 20 tons of garbage was cleared up in just two days. Besides the red leaves, the garbage left behind by visitors also became the highlight of Xiang Shan. This has set us into thinking--How far is ecological tourism away from us?
Garbage overload in tourism areas
As early as in 2006, in order to promote civilized traveling, China Central Civilization Office and the National Tourism Administration together issued the Chinese Citizens Domestic Tourism Conventions of Civilized Behavior. The first article of the convention is “Preservation of environmental sanitation, no spitting and chewing gums, no littering and no smoking in non-smoking areas.” However, this convention does not arouse visitors’ attention. During holidays, every scenic spot will encounter a “garbage disaster”-- visitors are having a good time without any concern about littering, while cleaning staff are having a busy time in cleaning up the garbage left by visitors.
In china, this is the case for most hot scenic spots. Every Mid-Autumn Festival, Sanya will attract lots of visitors to spend the sweet moment of “the moon growing full over the sea, brightening the whole heaven” with their families with its unique climatic conditions and natural beauty. However, on the second day after Mid-Autumn, garbage cleaning will be an arduous task for the staff. According to statistics, after this year’s Mid-Autumn Festival, 50 tons of garbage was all over the beach of Dadonghai scenic spot with a length of three kilometers. To prevent the garbage to harm the sea environment, relevant departments dispatched over 60 workers to spend more than 2 hours to clean all the garbage.
Every year, on China’s National Day Holiday, lots of visitors come to Tiananmen Square to watch the flag-raising ceremony regardless of the weather. But after the ceremony is finished and visitors have left, the square became a mess of garbage: waste paper, waste fruits snack bags, cigarette butts, beverage bottles and fast food packaging etc. Through the efforts of hundreds of cleaning staff, almost 5 tons of garbage will be cleaned. In fact, compared with the 20 tons of garbage cleaned on 1st October in 2010, visitors of this year are pretty lenient. Equally surprising is the 495 tons of garbage generated at Gulangyu Island in Xiamen. The yearly garbage cleaned at Mount Tai in Shandong Province is more than 2,000 tons. In order to clean the garbage left by visitors, in Mount Hua scenic area of Shaanxi Province, a sanitation worker has to risk his life to climb up to the mountain edges to clean the garbage thrown away by visitors. Actually, tourism garbage is not a case only in China, a country with large population and many tourist attractions. Now, the negative effects of tourism garbage on ecological environment have become a big problem for tourism industry of each country.
In recent years, the Nile delta, which gave birth to the ancient Egyptian civilization, has suffered from severe garbage pollution, resulting in an increasingly declining ecological situation. Waste tissues are everywhere along the sandbars and reeds along the Nile River shore together with lots of cans, soda bottles and sundries. Such is the case in Canale della Giudecca in Venice, a famous tourism city in Italy. The volume of garbage plied up in the river way is up to four hectares, which makes the residents along the river suffer a lot. The New York residents living along the stinky Gowanus Canal have the same experience.
Attention to ecological damage
Working staff in tourism areas feel helpless about the garbage left behind by the visitors, for garbage has not only affected the beautiful scenery of the scenic areas and the good mood of visitors but also become a heavy burden for cleaning staff. Especially in summer, the travel season, which is also the rainy season with hot and humid weather, the untimely disposed garbage becomes rotten. Some garbage soaked by rain and fermented by high temperature is likely to explode. The water, soil, air and creatures will also suffer from the negative impacts of tourism garbage. Besides, the toxic gas generated from garbage will also directly harm visitors’ health.
Actually, that the damage tourism garbage has caused to ecological environment has increasingly caught the attention of countries all around the world. In the 1960s, the concept of “ecological tourism” began to rise worldwide and in recent 20 years, it has gained a rapid development. To promote ecological tourism, the United Nations designated 2002 to be “International Ecological Tourism Year”. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Tourism Organization (WTO) have initiated and held the world ecotourism summit in Quebec, Canada, proposed several suggestions about international ecotourism development and issued Quebec Declaration of Ecotourism and Recommendations of World Ecotourism Summit, which pointed out the direction of world ecotourism. However, over the passage of more than 10 years, tourism garbage is still a major threat to ecological environment. How the garbage turned from “insignificant” to “significant”?
To remind visitors of civilized travel, some tourist attractions have to put up slogans like “Besides footprints, please do not leave anything behind; besides memories, please do not take anything”. Why on earth is tourism garbage so rampant and sustainable treatment so difficult.
The problem of visitors’ randomly dropping garbage firstly reflects the relatively low quality of visitors. Wang Chenguang, an associate professor of Tourism Management Department of Shandong University, regards the indiscipline of visitors as the root cause of non-civilized travel. Visitors walk while eating and dropping garbage. Some even make tourism garbage as entertainment tools, for example, the cases of visitors tossing bottles to high air and plucking tree branches and flowers to take photos and then randomly throwing them away are often seen.
Wang Chenguang also said that another reason of tourism garbage is the failure of scenic areas to release the current situation of visitors’ jams which resulted in visitors crowding in one area. When the number of visitors becomes more and more, there will be more visitors randomly dropping garbage and consequently the overall civilization condition will decline, which causes the contradiction between visitors and the environmental capability.
Lao Yi, a senior travel planner, thinks that laws and regulations related to tourism pay too much attention to guard the behaviors of travel agencies but only to remind visitors of civilized travel without concrete punishing regulations, which makes visitors negligent of their own behaviors and not regarding protecting scenic spots environment as their own responsibilities.
Wang Weiping, an expert on garbage of Beijing Municipal Commission of Administration considers the “over-packaging” of snacks as one of the reasons of garbage increase. Besides, the lack of efficient regulations on visitor’s behaviors of littering and lack of sound supervision system have also led to the situation that the staff focus on charging admission fee yet neglect visitors’ behaviors of littering.
Global joint efforts to protect the environment
Faced with above difficulties, in order to timely solve the problem of tourism garbage, different countries have adopted different approaches. Italy promotes “green travel”, getting away from the hustle and bustle of cities into countryside to enjoy life. This “green travel” is always on the trend and become the first choice of many office workers. Singapore, the world famous green city with a steady stream of visitors throughout the year, imposes a heavy fine towards litterers. Early in this year, the fine to litterers was raised to 500 SGD, equivalent to 2500 RMB. If there are any visitors harming the environment, they will be heavily fined once they are caught by undercover law enforcement officers.
Egypt has trainings for tourism practitioners. Egypt Tourism Authority is deeply aware of the importance of strengthening people’s awareness of environment protection. In the end of 1980s, Aqaba National Tourist Sanctuary begun to have trainings on workers’ relevant knowledge to make sure they are equipped with professional environmental knowledge and qualified for their work.
When Japanese people go out, they carry their own garbage bags. Each year, Japan’s Fuji Rock Festival attracts lots of fans. Despite the small quantity of garbage boxes, there is little garbage left after the ceremony ends. People will consciously ask for garbage bags and drop their garbage into different bags held by volunteers after making garbage classification.
China’s tourism management should be strengthened
As a populous country and a large tourism country, China, has long been troubled by “tourism garbage” for years. To solve this problem, scenic areas have successively adopted some approaches. For instance, during this year’s National Holiday, Lishan, a scenic spot in Shaanxi Province, performed an approach of “exchanging mineral water with tourism garbage”, which earned strong recognition of the society. However, in the opinions of the experts the reporter visited, the problem of non-civilized tourism cannot be solved in one action. The goal of ecotourism and civilized tourism needs the joint efforts of scenic areas, visitors and the government.
Experts recommend that while each scenic area is doing its own work, relevant authorities should make related policies based on current situation. In their opinion, if we want to prevent scenic areas to turn into garbage gardens, it is considerable to build a security checkpoint at the entrance of scenic area to specify the items which are forbidden in the area. This can make tourism garbage strangled in the cradle. Besides setting up security checkpoints, various media should be made use of to publicize the importance of ecological tourism. Environmental protection slogans can also be put on food packages and garbage cans on city streets to enhance citizens’ awareness of environmental protection. In addition to the publicity, a detailed and strict punishment measure should be formulated to deter the uncivilized behaviors of visitors. Institutionalized management will be more powerful and effective.
Garbage overload in tourism areas
As early as in 2006, in order to promote civilized traveling, China Central Civilization Office and the National Tourism Administration together issued the Chinese Citizens Domestic Tourism Conventions of Civilized Behavior. The first article of the convention is “Preservation of environmental sanitation, no spitting and chewing gums, no littering and no smoking in non-smoking areas.” However, this convention does not arouse visitors’ attention. During holidays, every scenic spot will encounter a “garbage disaster”-- visitors are having a good time without any concern about littering, while cleaning staff are having a busy time in cleaning up the garbage left by visitors.
In china, this is the case for most hot scenic spots. Every Mid-Autumn Festival, Sanya will attract lots of visitors to spend the sweet moment of “the moon growing full over the sea, brightening the whole heaven” with their families with its unique climatic conditions and natural beauty. However, on the second day after Mid-Autumn, garbage cleaning will be an arduous task for the staff. According to statistics, after this year’s Mid-Autumn Festival, 50 tons of garbage was all over the beach of Dadonghai scenic spot with a length of three kilometers. To prevent the garbage to harm the sea environment, relevant departments dispatched over 60 workers to spend more than 2 hours to clean all the garbage.
Every year, on China’s National Day Holiday, lots of visitors come to Tiananmen Square to watch the flag-raising ceremony regardless of the weather. But after the ceremony is finished and visitors have left, the square became a mess of garbage: waste paper, waste fruits snack bags, cigarette butts, beverage bottles and fast food packaging etc. Through the efforts of hundreds of cleaning staff, almost 5 tons of garbage will be cleaned. In fact, compared with the 20 tons of garbage cleaned on 1st October in 2010, visitors of this year are pretty lenient. Equally surprising is the 495 tons of garbage generated at Gulangyu Island in Xiamen. The yearly garbage cleaned at Mount Tai in Shandong Province is more than 2,000 tons. In order to clean the garbage left by visitors, in Mount Hua scenic area of Shaanxi Province, a sanitation worker has to risk his life to climb up to the mountain edges to clean the garbage thrown away by visitors. Actually, tourism garbage is not a case only in China, a country with large population and many tourist attractions. Now, the negative effects of tourism garbage on ecological environment have become a big problem for tourism industry of each country.
In recent years, the Nile delta, which gave birth to the ancient Egyptian civilization, has suffered from severe garbage pollution, resulting in an increasingly declining ecological situation. Waste tissues are everywhere along the sandbars and reeds along the Nile River shore together with lots of cans, soda bottles and sundries. Such is the case in Canale della Giudecca in Venice, a famous tourism city in Italy. The volume of garbage plied up in the river way is up to four hectares, which makes the residents along the river suffer a lot. The New York residents living along the stinky Gowanus Canal have the same experience.
Attention to ecological damage
Working staff in tourism areas feel helpless about the garbage left behind by the visitors, for garbage has not only affected the beautiful scenery of the scenic areas and the good mood of visitors but also become a heavy burden for cleaning staff. Especially in summer, the travel season, which is also the rainy season with hot and humid weather, the untimely disposed garbage becomes rotten. Some garbage soaked by rain and fermented by high temperature is likely to explode. The water, soil, air and creatures will also suffer from the negative impacts of tourism garbage. Besides, the toxic gas generated from garbage will also directly harm visitors’ health.
Actually, that the damage tourism garbage has caused to ecological environment has increasingly caught the attention of countries all around the world. In the 1960s, the concept of “ecological tourism” began to rise worldwide and in recent 20 years, it has gained a rapid development. To promote ecological tourism, the United Nations designated 2002 to be “International Ecological Tourism Year”. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Tourism Organization (WTO) have initiated and held the world ecotourism summit in Quebec, Canada, proposed several suggestions about international ecotourism development and issued Quebec Declaration of Ecotourism and Recommendations of World Ecotourism Summit, which pointed out the direction of world ecotourism. However, over the passage of more than 10 years, tourism garbage is still a major threat to ecological environment. How the garbage turned from “insignificant” to “significant”?
To remind visitors of civilized travel, some tourist attractions have to put up slogans like “Besides footprints, please do not leave anything behind; besides memories, please do not take anything”. Why on earth is tourism garbage so rampant and sustainable treatment so difficult.
The problem of visitors’ randomly dropping garbage firstly reflects the relatively low quality of visitors. Wang Chenguang, an associate professor of Tourism Management Department of Shandong University, regards the indiscipline of visitors as the root cause of non-civilized travel. Visitors walk while eating and dropping garbage. Some even make tourism garbage as entertainment tools, for example, the cases of visitors tossing bottles to high air and plucking tree branches and flowers to take photos and then randomly throwing them away are often seen.
Wang Chenguang also said that another reason of tourism garbage is the failure of scenic areas to release the current situation of visitors’ jams which resulted in visitors crowding in one area. When the number of visitors becomes more and more, there will be more visitors randomly dropping garbage and consequently the overall civilization condition will decline, which causes the contradiction between visitors and the environmental capability.
Lao Yi, a senior travel planner, thinks that laws and regulations related to tourism pay too much attention to guard the behaviors of travel agencies but only to remind visitors of civilized travel without concrete punishing regulations, which makes visitors negligent of their own behaviors and not regarding protecting scenic spots environment as their own responsibilities.
Wang Weiping, an expert on garbage of Beijing Municipal Commission of Administration considers the “over-packaging” of snacks as one of the reasons of garbage increase. Besides, the lack of efficient regulations on visitor’s behaviors of littering and lack of sound supervision system have also led to the situation that the staff focus on charging admission fee yet neglect visitors’ behaviors of littering.
Global joint efforts to protect the environment
Faced with above difficulties, in order to timely solve the problem of tourism garbage, different countries have adopted different approaches. Italy promotes “green travel”, getting away from the hustle and bustle of cities into countryside to enjoy life. This “green travel” is always on the trend and become the first choice of many office workers. Singapore, the world famous green city with a steady stream of visitors throughout the year, imposes a heavy fine towards litterers. Early in this year, the fine to litterers was raised to 500 SGD, equivalent to 2500 RMB. If there are any visitors harming the environment, they will be heavily fined once they are caught by undercover law enforcement officers.
Egypt has trainings for tourism practitioners. Egypt Tourism Authority is deeply aware of the importance of strengthening people’s awareness of environment protection. In the end of 1980s, Aqaba National Tourist Sanctuary begun to have trainings on workers’ relevant knowledge to make sure they are equipped with professional environmental knowledge and qualified for their work.
When Japanese people go out, they carry their own garbage bags. Each year, Japan’s Fuji Rock Festival attracts lots of fans. Despite the small quantity of garbage boxes, there is little garbage left after the ceremony ends. People will consciously ask for garbage bags and drop their garbage into different bags held by volunteers after making garbage classification.
China’s tourism management should be strengthened
As a populous country and a large tourism country, China, has long been troubled by “tourism garbage” for years. To solve this problem, scenic areas have successively adopted some approaches. For instance, during this year’s National Holiday, Lishan, a scenic spot in Shaanxi Province, performed an approach of “exchanging mineral water with tourism garbage”, which earned strong recognition of the society. However, in the opinions of the experts the reporter visited, the problem of non-civilized tourism cannot be solved in one action. The goal of ecotourism and civilized tourism needs the joint efforts of scenic areas, visitors and the government.
Experts recommend that while each scenic area is doing its own work, relevant authorities should make related policies based on current situation. In their opinion, if we want to prevent scenic areas to turn into garbage gardens, it is considerable to build a security checkpoint at the entrance of scenic area to specify the items which are forbidden in the area. This can make tourism garbage strangled in the cradle. Besides setting up security checkpoints, various media should be made use of to publicize the importance of ecological tourism. Environmental protection slogans can also be put on food packages and garbage cans on city streets to enhance citizens’ awareness of environmental protection. In addition to the publicity, a detailed and strict punishment measure should be formulated to deter the uncivilized behaviors of visitors. Institutionalized management will be more powerful and effective.