I may have remarked upon this before: How casual most people in this country are about getting rid of their trash … anywhere they please.

Where do you dispose of wrappers, bags, papers, in the UAE? Out your window. Or at your feet.

You just drop it and forget about it.

This hit home for the umpteenth time today when I came out my front door and was impressed by the detritus that had collected, overnight, in the weeds.

And then I tried to put it in a bigger picture, when comparing it to the First World.

When traveling travel through most western European countries,  many people notice how tidy they are. Germany and Holland are known for their “everything disposed of properly” enthusiasm. In Paris, when garbage workers are not on strike, they empty every trash can in the city twice a day. Italy, Spain, all the Scandinavian countries … the same. Tidy. Clean.

My sense is that the United States was a bit behind the Euros, when it came to tidying up, for taking personal responsibility for their own refuse.

The cable series “Mad Men” had an episode, in the first or second season, in which Don Draper took his family on a picnic, and as they got up to leave … the trash they were casually abandoning at a park was startling.

This was supposed to be 1960, or so. And as I searched my memory, I had to concede tossing trash … wherever … was a common habit. Especially among drivers. Then came a series of anti-litter campaigns (“Every litter bit hurts!”) and behavior actually changed. The U.S. now may not be as tidy as Germany, but it’s far, far better than it was a half-century ago.

Why, then, are the UAE and the subcontinent lagging when it comes to picking up after themselves?

Perhaps an only recent availability of trash-generating packaging? Consumer goods here are packed and re-packed to the nth degree. Maybe because they can. Set on styrofoam, hugged by shrink wrap, wrapped anew with foil and carried away in a plastic bag. None of which can be recycled, in the UAE, anyway.

If we consider that societies in the region prepared their own food and had forever until a generation ago … not being clear on picking up is easier to understand.

Also, if you grow up in an area where the population is dense and you don’t actually own your own plot of anything, where sewage systems are rudimentary, what’s the problem with chucking another wad of paper out a door?

And then it occurred to me that the local approach to trash and the western one … are just a matter of locale.

In the West, we pick up our streets and our parks and our cities … and take really large amounts of trash away to dumps. Thus, our immediate environs may seem tidy, but we have enormous, festering, mountainous trash heaps out in the countryside. The West still produces more trash, per capita, than just about anywhere else. We just go to the effort of collecting it and trucking it out of sight.

In some areas in this region,  garbage dumps are only recently beginning to take hold as a good idea. For many people, “mulching” and “composting” begin outside your door. At your feet. On the highway.

The UAE generates lots of trash because it is a wealthy country, and those concepts seem to go hand in hand. Wealth and trash. But the subcontinent … not nearly as wealthy. And “the dump” probably is ,,, everywhere. The idea of spending money to collect trash just to take it somewhere else to rot … well, it must seem ludicrous.

So? I’m trying to be big-picture about this. Eventually, countries in the region may attempt to recycle, and reduce the visual pollution of plastic bags tumbling across the landscape and the “ick” factor of opening your front door and seeing the remnants of someone’s dinner on your lawn. All that may someday be a thing of the past.

For now, many people in the region see the whole world as a trash can. And I can’t really say that the approach is all that different than taking just as much trash far away and letting it fester there.