The Waste "Stream"

It's interesting about that term, the "waste stream." It sanitizes the idea of discard, it's like, it's just this "stream" ... it's just an innocuous thing that's sort of naturally occurring. The levels of waste that we produce in a free market system are by no means the natural outcome of some organic process.

Wait... did I just post a lame tid-bit about droopy eye syndrome? I must have forgotten about a the interesting (all-be-it pre-recorded) segment on this week's Science Friday.

Ira talks with Heather Rogers, filmmaker and author of Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, and Jim Puckett, coordinator of the Basel Action Network

The radio show is interesting, a lot of talk about e-waste, and how so much of the old computers from the US, filled with toxic chemicals, end up being "recycled" in Nigeria or China where they extract the valuable materials by burning the dangerous ones away in a hand-held wok over a coal fire and pouring the waste into the river.

What was a little surprising to me, was that this is still happening. While I know that the toxins don't just disappear, I was under the impression that there was by now at least an effort by most companies to be socially responsible, and that such blatant outsourcing of death and decease was a thing of the near past. This is one of the points she raises in the book as well, as she said in an interview on AlterNet:

there's been a decline in the recycling rate. People's attention and the political pressure on companies like Waste Management to recycle is waning because people do think our wastes are being handled in an environmentally sound fashion.

I know Europe and Japan have more regulations than the US regarding the export of waste, although I am not sure to what extent this keeps their shit out of China or some other impoverished country. This is something I am researching for work too, so I should be more in-the-know soon.

Fifteen years ago, a UN treaty called the Basel Convention was adopted to regulate the movement of hazardous materials across international borders. Since that time 166 countries, including seven of the G-8 nations, have ratified it. The United States, along with Haiti and Afghanistan, have yet to follow suit. (The Nation: An E-Cycling Nightmare

And National Geographic reports:

Forty-five percent of the junk that's coming in [to Lagos] is coming from the United States. Another 45 percent comes from Europe, and the other 10 percent from Japan and Israel.

The quote at the top of this post is from the same AlterNet interview. Here are some other interesting excerpts from the program and elsewhere:

QUESTION:can technology solve the waste problem or is it just exacerbating it? We thought that when we had computers we would use less paper and it turns out we use more paper.

ANSWER:Technology never creates less waste.

But then she later says:

[W]hy can't we change the production process so that it's less wasteful? I do think that industrial production can be made better. I do think that it's incredibly wasteful the way that it operates now. There's so much room for improvement. But I don't think that we have to get rid of industrial production.

I think it's important to acknowledge what's happened on the cultural level in terms of indoctrinating people to disposability. A lot of effort has been made to teach people to throw things away. It's not something that that comes natural to people.

with just 5 percent of the global population we generate 30 percent of the world's trash

From The Nation: An E-Cycling Nightmare

In the United States alone, an estimated 100 million computers will become obsolete next year, contributing to what is the fastest growing waste stream in the industrialized world--e-waste.

From National Geographic: Toxic "E-Waste" Gets Cached in Poor Nations, Rep

Reduce, reuse, recycle. This familiar environmentalist slogan outlines an approach to minimizing how much trash ends up in landfills, incinerators, and waterways. ...

Much of the waste ends up being discarded along rivers and roads. Often it's picked apart by destitute scavengers, who may face dangerous exposure to toxic chemicals in the broken equipment.

But when it comes to e-waste...

"A lot of these materials are being sent [to developing nations] under the guise of reuse—to bridge the digital divide," said Richard Gutierrez, a toxics policy analyst for the Seattle, Washington-based Basel Action Network.

Anyway, I could go on and on, but I wont. I have to go buy that new iPod I have been wanting so I can listen to Living on Earth pod-casts as I ride my bike to work.