Trash Talk
Let’s take a brief detour from the nonstop news dumpster fire and instead dive into (the topic of) actual dumpsters filled with trash. You may be surprised to learn the some of the items you toss into the recycling bin end up recycled as someone else’s garbage. Wealthier countries sending their garbage to poorer countries is nothing new. A 1992 treaty “made it illegal to export toxic waste from developed to developing countries.” But for many countries on the receiving end of the global garbage conveyor belt, that treaty ended up in the trash heap of history. “The poorer nations of the world have never stopped being receptacles for the West’s ever-proliferating rubbish. The situation now is, in many respects, worse than it was in the 1980s. Then, there was widespread recognition that waste export was immoral. Today, most waste travels under the guise of being recyclable, cloaked in the language of planetary salvation.” Alexander Clapp in the NYT (Gift Article): The Story You’ve Been Told About Recycling Is a Lie. “It’s not just your old DVD player getting shipped to West Africa. Today’s waste trade is an opportunistic bonanza, an escape valve of environmental responsibility that profits off routing detritus of every conceivable variety to places that are in no position to take it. Your discarded clothes? They may go to a desert in Chile. The last cruise ship you boarded? Hacked to pieces in Bangladesh. Your depleted car battery? Stacked in a warehouse in Mexico. Is some of it run by organized crime? Of course. ‘For us,’ a Naples mafioso boasted in 2008, ‘rubbish is gold.’ But much of it doesn’t have to be. Waste export remains scandalously underregulated and unmonitored. Practically anyone can give it a go.”
+ Rich countries get their garbage out of sight and out of mind, waste middlemen turn rubbish into gold, and a lot of people are robbed of their golden years. “Cancer rates have soared in Casalnuovo di Napoli, Italy, where burying or burning of waste has poisoned water and land.” ‘Triangle of death’: will Italy finally tackle mafia’s toxic waste dumping?
