Japanese Helps Clean Up Putrajaya & Collects 4,500 Cigarette Butts In Just 1.5 Hours

By Karissa Lund  •  29 May 2020 in News

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Cigarette butts can be easy to miss. They’re small, they blend in, and admittedly can be a blind spot for many of us. You don’t notice them until you see A LOT of them.

Like this stash of 4,500 cigarette butts picked up from the streets of Putrajaya by a Japanese man.

The Japanese, who is known as Nana, shared a photo on Twitter that showed mounds of cigarette butts that he managed to pick up at the Ayer@8 area in Putrajaya within one and a half hours. The photo was taken during a clean-up run earlier this year by the non-profit organisation – Trash Hero Malaysia.

“So many cigarette butts littered everywhere,” he wrote in Japanese along with a crying emoji.

タバコの吸い殻のポイ捨てが多い😭
今年の初めPutrajayaのAyer 8でごみ拾いした時の写真です。1時間半で4500本もの吸い殻を拾いました。#Putrajaya pic.twitter.com/X8vngH7vKP

— Nana@Cyberjaya 🇯🇵🇲🇾✌️ (@NanaCyber2) May 26, 2020

One Twitter user replied to Nana saying that Malaysians still have a long way to go when it comes to being mindful of disposing of their litter properly.

“I think the problem is that people think it’s okay to litter since their rubbish will be picked up by cleaners anyway. We need to instil the mindset of ‘I have to throw away my own rubbish’ from a young age,” said the user.

This isn’t the first time Nana has gotten his hands dirty. Back in February, he and his fellow volunteers picked up 202kg of rubbish in Cyberjaya.

“We picked up 202 kilogrammes of rubbish including bottles, cigarette butts, and more,” he wrote.

MCO前の2/29。GEM-IN-MALLの裏でごみ拾いをやった時の1枚。

ペットボトル、タバコのポイ捨て多かった。2時間で202kgのゴミを拾いましたよ pic.twitter.com/yc4ks36uU5

— Nana@Cyberjaya 🇯🇵🇲🇾✌️ (@NanaCyber2) May 24, 2020

Residing in Cyberjaya, Nana shared that he likes to volunteer for various charity initiatives which was what made him get in touch with global volunteer movement – Trash Hero.

Trash Hero hosts weekly cleanup programmes that anyone can join at designated locations. The global movement is run by volunteers and aims to bring communities together to clean and reduce waste in the environment.

We could all be more caring towards our one and only planet Earth. Maybe once CMCO is over, we could volunteer like Nana too?

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