Mixing different writing styles in essays by seven SeaWrite Award winners and four celebrities, it's innovative and intellectual. This is no mere lesson on littering.

Why is it that a pop bottle can be both throwaway junk and valued collectible? Can undesirable people be considered rubbish? Is the sea a holiday destination or a garbage bin? Why is littering a bigger problem in rural areas than it is in urban settings?

And what about those notions of dumping our trash in space or on some other planet?

This handsome, well presented book - part of the Siam Cement-financed Do It Clean project - has a cover by Patrida Prasarntong, who also drew the one-page comics strips called "Women come from the Skytrain, Men come from recycling vehicles" that punctuate its articles.  

"Woven stories of a beautiful city," a cover blurb calls it. It's an appeal for clean, litter-free communities.

A poem by Naowarat Pongpaiboon opens the volume, linking individual health with an air- and noise-pollution-free environment.

Then four young contributors - two writers, a singer and an Olympic gold medallist - weigh in on waste.

The book closes with four celebrities briefly explaining how they recycle and even "spin garbage into gold".

There are several helpful pages of recent statistics on rubbish and a list of simple steps everyone can take to limit the damage of indiscriminate littering.

The average Bangkok resident contributes a kilogram of trash to the capital's daily output of 8,590 tonnes, it's noted.

Meanwhile, all those aluminium cans piling up in the bin could be sold to a recycling shop for up to Bt40 per kilo.

If they're not reused, they're going to spend the next century in a pile of refuse somewhere before they finally start breaking down.

"Once-upon-a-time Rubbish", Attsiri Dhammachote's powerful and beautifully written memoir of his childhood visits to the coast, is a fine addition to his hallmark prose about the sea.

A Prachuap Khiri Khan native, Attsiri poignantly recalls how the cigarette packets and pop-can rings that now coat the beaches were once so rare that kids collected them along with shells, as tiny treasures.

And there was a time he watched fascinated as vultures circled calmly above the floating corpses of pigs, dogs and cats taken out to sea and returned to shore by monsoon waves.

There were human corpses too, he writes, and animal faeces - but the point is that all of this was decomposing quickly or becoming part of the food chain.

Now things don't decompose as they once did. The vultures are gone, and the scavengers that replaced them - rats and cockroaches - are regarded as rubbish themselves, to be eradicated if possible.

 Win Leowarin's science-fiction story "Gifts from the Sky" showcases his experimental writing. It challenges our imagination to envision how the planet's garbage might be siphoned off to other planets through "wormholes".

Celebrated poet Paiwarin Kao-gnam's "Ode to Rubbish" is a lament about his many countryside treks ruined by appalling fields of litter.

One day in 1999, he and his friends set out on a fishing trip in the Northeast, for old times' sake, and discovered a vein of discarded coffee cans. "Our farmers are not that unstylish, are they?" he asks, dismayed by Thais' readiness to litter even where bins are provided.

Citing many first-hand experiences and disturbing examples, Paiwarin - who is Bangkok-based but travels often to the countryside - makes the point that waste removal and disposal are even more lacking in rural Thailand than they are in the cities.

By Sukanya Hantrakul