I went to Boulder to visit a friend not long ago (I may have mentioned that, I am commenting a day later) and I liked it but was kind of shocked at the amount of homelessness and the beggars are literally everywhere, listening in on your conversations and following you until you give them a buck or two to go away.
I am surprised to hear that Coloradians are dirtying up nature trails... That's a pity for sure. I was impressed with the amount of bike trails when I was visiting. As a bike riding enthusiast, that is always a welcome addition for me.
I don't know what the west could to to help South East Asia have a more responsible disposal system because waste management is just terrible even at the collection level where the norm is to leave your plastic trash bags on the curb where it is almost immediately ripped open by stray dogs. These countries are also ripe with corruption so any sort of cash donation would almost certainly be squandered and any materials would be stolen (this happened when the international community installed mooring lines to help protect the reefs and all of them disappeared in a few months)
It is a complicated problem for sure and the only thing I could think of that might work would be to privatize the system and have the payment withdrawn if certain standards were not met. Of course that would probably just get riddled with corruption as well.
Also, the international community would have to accept the fact that these areas are not going to stop with their very high level of plastic use until there is a viable (financially speaking) alternative. It's nice and all to read this articles about coconut husks being used to make bags but then if you read the fine print and see that production cost is 20x that of a plastic bag you can forget about anyone ever using them - especially poorer countries.
The only thing we can really hope for over here (I'm in Thailand by the way) is that an system of energy-producing incinerators can be constructed the likes of which they already use in Singapore. I know it isn't the most desirable thing, but if we are expecting SE Asia to start behaving like Norway in terms of responsible environmentalism, everyone is going to end up disappointed because the population here is too poor to care.