Channel News Asia 4 March 2024:
Identified offenders will be dealt with under the law, including being fined or charged in court, the National Environment Agency (NEA) said.
“Care will be exercised” in cases committed by young children, the elderly or vulnerable groups, the agency added.
Feedback on littering has risen 15 per cent from 2022 to 2023, compared with the two years before the pandemic, said Senior Parliament Secretary Baey Yam Keng, while detailing the Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment’s spending plans on Monday (Mar 4).
Authorities will increase the number of closed-circuit television deployments by four times to around 1,000 a year to step up surveillance against littering.
The NEA also plans to conduct more, larger scale and higher visibility blitzes at “cleanliness hotspots”, from 21 last year to more than 100 this year.
Corrective Work Orders, where recalcitrant offenders are required to clean public areas for at least three hours, will be conducted at hotspots. About 1,600 Corrective Work Orders were issued between 2021 and 2023.
Mr Baey noted that education efforts and campaigns have paid off, and Singaporeans are “generally civic-minded”.
“However, we continue to observe some persistent issues, that require us to go beyond just public education,” he said.
“This year, we will be working more closely with the community and ramping up our efforts to address persistent pain points … The pandemic may be over, but Singapore needs a clean environment to be well-prepared to tackle future public health threats.”
This is ridiculous in a civilised country. It only encourages doxxing and cyber bullying of those labelled as litterbugs. People who are unoccupied after dinner may start to dig up the litterbugs’ CV or even their family trees. People may end up losing their jobs and innocent family members may be affected. How are you going to control the behaviour of virtue-signalling keyboard warriors? It’s just like 借刀杀人。 Singapore is not dirty by any standards. A 15% increase in complaints? Are the authorities so overworked that they need to resort to harnessing mob justice? What if education is not working? Perhaps the educators need to learn something new. How about compulsory continuing education for the educators?
From my observation, the urge to litter normally arises when the rubbish bins are full or not conveniently located. With plastic bags so difficult to come by nowadays, could this increase in littering be due to the inconvenience of carrying rubbish around until it can be appropriately disposed of? Perhaps we should all carry a trash bag when we go out. Perhaps the NEA should distribute one for everyone attending major events.
I disagree. Many people litter due to habit and total lack of civic mindedness. Even if the dustbin is 2 steps away, there are people who will just throw rubbish on the floor.
Case in point is high rise littering, people who throw rubbish at multi-storey car parks, etc.
Here in Singapore, you probably cannot walk 100m in HDB estate without encountering a dustbin. And yet, people still litter. They do so because they can litter with impunity.
Best to nip the problem early, rather than employ more cleaners.
So where is the limit? Get the family involved as someone suggested? How about getting an audience to cheer while the whole family performs CWO? Will that “nip the problem early”? Ask your foreigner friends for a bit of perspective. We are already a very very sanitised country. Increase the fines, jail the offenders but there is no need to go to such dehumanising extremes and cultivating an intolerant society obsessed with cleanliness.
https://youtu.be/q3O79ERuagw?si=virRCMdSuhtUGAuC