Psi Lingkungan - Esai 3 – Before After - Dr. A. Shinta, M. A - SPSJ - 8 November 2025

 BEFORE AND AFTER: SMALL VISIBLE ACT

Hana Fardilla – 24310410048 – Psikologi Kelas Karyawan
Psikologi Lingkungan - Esai 3 -  Dr. A. Shinta, M. A
Fakultas Psikologi Universitas Proklamasi 45
Yogyakarta

UGM Wisdom Park is simply my most favorite place in Yogyakarta. It is far away from my boarding house, but this is the place I can feel the calmest. I come here at least once a month, just for enjoy some lunch or read or write in my little diary. I love to have a little picnic under the shades of trees and green grass.

Before enrolling Environmental Psychology, I never really notice the surrounding. I thought the place was cool and calming, only sometimes, I can smell a foul scent coming from the river. I tried to see if the water is dirty or has a strange color, but it looks clean, I could even see small fish and crabs swimming around.

Then one day, when I was looking for a place to do my “before and after” project, I decided to go there again. As I walked past the tunnel at UGM Wisdom Park, I noticed something I had never really seen before, piles of trash along the riverbank, and even in the middle of the water. I couldn’t tell what some of them were.

I’d always wanted to give something back to this place, and that discovery gave me an idea. I decided to make this spot one of the my ‘before after’ project. I didn’t do it right away because I didn’t bring the trash bag, and with thing going on in my life, the plan was delayed for 3 weeks.

Between the hope that the trash might already be gone and the fear of losing a project site, I finally went back on the 3rd of November at 9 AM. I even took a day off from work for this. I was prepared, or so I thought. But with a mix of excitement and disappointment, I found the pile still there, maybe even worse than before.

At first, it looked like a small area, and I thought it would be easy. I put down my bag and started climbing down. I picked up the big things first, bottles, plastic wrappers, and containers. After 5 minutes, my first trash bag was already full. Panic started to creep in. After 30 minutes, I realized I had been too ambitious. I had run out of trash bags, and there were still so many things, diapers, bottles filled with urine, and waste I couldn’t even identify.

Then I found a broken basket, which I decided to use to carry trash to the nearby bins. Luckily, the park had many. No, I didn’t bring the waste home, but I knew that even if this effort felt small or temporary, it was still worth doing. It weights around 8 kilos if I counted the diapers and the huge wet jacket I found in the middle of the river. 

By 11:30 AM, I stopped and took the “after” picture.

It was far from perfect, there was still waste on the other side of the river. It was hard to ignore, but I couldn’t continue. Not yet.

I never really have any idea where to go. I’ve been living in Yogyakarta for 10 years, yet I still don’t know any good spots for my next before-after project. So, on Saturday, November 8th, I went around from Candi Gebang to Pasar Concat to Ledok Blotan, and finally ended up at Lapangan Kayen, which looks like a small soccer field near the Model School on Wedomartani Street. I parked my motorcycle at 09:06 and started picking up trash around the field. I took pictures of some spots that I remembered photographing.

This time it didn’t look as significant as before because the trash wasn’t pile up at one place but scattered all over the place. Halfway through I realize this one should be my plogging spot instead.

One thing I learned during this experience is that, the trash, the more you look, the more you’ll see them. What doesn’t seem to be a dirty ground got me 1 hour and 15 minutes back and forth until I am pretty sure nothing was left behind.

This time the trash returns as usual type, plastics cups and cilok/pentol plastic wrappers, which I still have no idea what to do with them. I took 2 clean bottles, washed them, and put it on my ‘plastic bottle collection’, and the rest is on my boarding house bin.

I hope next time, I can do better.