A recent report from the Ocean Conservancy shows that volunteers around the world collected 6 million tons of beach debris in a single day. Wired.com has the full report and some downloadable spreadsheets for data geeks.
Japanese mountaineer Ken Nagouchi leads clean-up climbs of Mt. Everest. The latest such trip yielded 1,100 pounds of trash discarded by expidetioners along the way to legendary heights.
For more on the project, check out this Time Asia profile (photo from Time.com);
Or this conversation with marine ecologist and longtime resident of Japan, Jack Moyer.
This is a blog about Oscar the Grouch. It’s about the smoke of burning trash piles wafting through every developing country in the world. It’s about the billions of dollars a year spent exporting garbage from one state to another. It’s about diving into a dumpster and coming up with a still-warm burger and three packets of mustard. It’s about detonating landmines with old truck tires and building bookshelves out of milk crates. It’s about barges. It’s about battery acid. It’s about paying sixty bucks for a change purse made of soda can tabs because the label says a women’s group in Latin America glued them together. It’s about sorting plastics. It’s about beaches built on landfills and landfills built on beaches. It’s about the “away” in throw away and the “out” in toss out and the “rid” in get rid of it. This is a blog about the art, money, power, politics, people and literature of garbage. It’s a subject that shocks and amuses me nearly every day, which is about how often I imagine I’ll be posting. I hope you’ll share in the fascination.
