“Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital,” wrote Charles Baudelaire, invoking the ragpicker, a new type on the streets of his native nineteenth-century Paris. “Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot, he catalogs and collects.”
Buried in Baudelaire’s descriptions of ragpickers are processes that historians have recently laid bare. With industrialization came the rise of consumer culture, and with consumer culture came the rise of disposal culture. Add unfettered fossil fuel use and the invention of single-use plastics and we arrive at the ragpickers of today: people in Indonesia climbing mountains of trash, or children scavenging for survival in the slums of Delhi or Manila or northeastern Brazil. Consumer lifestyles in high-income nations have […]
We have a society built on fraud and cost shifting. This article is one example of the larger trend. Recycling is possible, but it must be planned and managed on a smaller, more local, scale. What has been sold to us, however, is fraud. It is based on our consumerist illusions which fosters increased consumption while working hard to hide the costs, many of which are shifted to the third world. This illusion has been fostered by corporations supported by both parties. Want a different outcome? Think and act outside the box.
Years ago, my husband did research on recycling and found that HALF of what they receive is so much that they return it to the public dumb! So I’m not going to recycle and never have!
In Oaxaca, the residents of the building paid for a plot of land to recycle garbage from edibles. And there were different sites for cans and bottles. This news doesn’t surprise me. Lake Chapala, where I live is extremely endangered. Eleven million people live in the catchment area (about 10 % of the total population of México), and the potential for conflict over regional water resources is high due to overexploitation and contamination. I suspect that old water supply systems are problematic worldwide except with countries like Norway and Sweden.
And the issues that have come from suffiicient lack of climate change..preparation has not happened.
The US is not a small country. Functional systems tend to be in places where communities have gathered together to be involved in life affirming change, which includes community systems like garbage and recycling. Ignoring faulty systems allows them to spread.