Garbage Landslide

  The trash-related news is grim today.  In Guatemala, a landslide at a dump killed four trash pickers.  For more about the lives of these people, check out the inspirational documentary Recycled Lives.

 

Weekly Compactor

This week in trash news:

• The People Improvement Organization opens a school in one of Cambodia’s largest dumps;
• The WSJ discovers eco-consumerism;
• Latin America Press profiles the carteneros;
• Germans find profit in the Naples trash crisis;
• Also in Italy, Sardinians block trash hauling in Cagliari; and
• Kyiv, Ukraine is the 26th dirtiest city in the world (Baku, Azerbaijan is #1).

Photo of Baku via advantour.com (apparently it doesn’t look dirty at night and from the sky).

First World Congress of Waste Pickers

Just got a tip from Maxwell about an international gathering of trash pickers hosted by the Bogotá Association of Recyclers (ARB).

“The 18,000-member ARB hosted hundreds of waste pickers from over 40 countries for a four-day conference in early March. Funded by international non-profits, the First World Congress of Waste Pickers was held “to exchange experiences and to create national and international alliances that will protect us from being stepped on by local governments,” said Ospina. The conference demonstrated that although trash recyclers around the world face socio-economic marginalization and harassment from local authorities, recyclers are also becoming increasingly organized and are winning important victories.”

(Photo by Marty Chen for ARB)

Weekly Compactor

This week in trash news:

• Switzerland will take–and burn–180,000 tons of trash from ailing Naples;
• Catadores contribute to better recycling in Brazil;
• Rauschenberg sues a gallery for selling his trash as art; and
• Reese Witherspoon confesses to garbage neurosis.

Photo of a Rauschenberg via warhol.org

Trash Worship

On this lovely Monday, a special shout-out goes to Paz for tipping me off to Garbage Worship, which led to a highly entertaining web search and the eventual stumbling upon of this killer trash Web site. There’s no better way to start a week of garblogging than to turn over a rock and discover an entire community of creative trashies! Image from trashworship.net.

The Garbage Cage

I came across this review of a new documentary on Palestinian trash pickers today. Yet another example of how trash explains the world (in this case class, conflict and social status). I’m not sure if this is screening or airing anywhere soon, all I found was the purchase info (and limited info at that). Let me know if you hear anything!

Zen Trash Squad

Check out this post on “Zen and the Art of Dumpster Diving” from the nytimes.com blog, Dot Earth. Apparently dumpster diving is an honored tradition among monks in Michigan. Not surprising when one considers the age-old world of trash pickers and Buddhist disdain for waste.

Unflattering photo caught by Geoff Kroepel for the Environment Report, reposted here via Dot Earth.  (Why that guy needs a back brace to scoop a parka from the trash is anyone’s guess.  Perhaps it’s all part of the meditation and center-searching.  I was kind of hoping for trash slings fashioned from saffron-colored robes.) 

Stealing a carrot from a pig (or raising awareness about our wasteful society)

Tonight I finally took a freegan trash tour, something I’ve been meaning to do for months. I’m glad I waited for two reasons. One, it’s Ramadan, a time of year when I’m especially conscious of food, its overabundance in my daily life and temporary absence during fasting. Two, tonight’s trash tour took place in Morningside Heights, which afforded me a fresh view of my childhood neighborhood.

From what I understand, the “freegans” of freegan.info see themselves as a sort of public relations arm of a larger movement aimed at reducing society’s waste and making use of discarded food. The group takes advantage of the relative freedom of New York City to dumpster dive and forage openly and with little interruption from store managers or the police. Members of the media and those new to freeganism are invited to rummage through garbage bags on street corners during trash tours (held several times a month) and to dine communally on the booty at occasional “freegan feasts.” In addition, their Web site deals with a variety of issues ranging from what we eat to a concept called “voluntary joblessness”.

What interested me was the chance to spend an evening more or less practicing what I preach here about ways to combat the overwhelming swell of city garbage. While it’s too late in the evening to process what I learned, I can share with you a little of what I experienced.

Meeting up with this evening’s tour proved easy enough. I showed up at the designated street corner where a Japanese cable access film crew, a student camera crew and a still photographer from Newsweek had already begun to document events. Right away I recognized at least three faces in the crowd from past media stories on freeganism. One of the organizers, a young woman in rubber-like protective bike gear and a bandanna, kicked off the tour with a short speech about privacy (for the benefit of the media present) and the importance of leaving places as clean as we found them. And we were off.

I accompanied the tour to three nearby sites: two grocery stores and one bagel joint. The first stop yielded less than expected (many present were collecting goods for a freegan potluck feast later in the week)—some bruised fruits and vegetables, mostly onions, made their way into tote bags and backpacks. As one freegan put it “it looks like pretty trashy trash this evening”.

The second stop, a high-end grocery known for poor labor practices and beautifully arranged if unaffordable produce, provided more in terms of both food and spectacle. Large plastic trash bins brimmed with overripe avocados, broken carrots and a hodgepodge of fancy greens. As the freegans went to work sorting and the accompanying media fell over themselves recording, a number of passersby stopped to stare, question and even join in the foraging. The event organizers quickly passed out calendar flyers, recited talking points and collected email addresses (I relay this not so much sarcastically as in awe of such tightly organized media strategy).

As one young man tipped a bin of wet produce into another empty container to sort through the carrots and berries at the bottom, a thickly accented voice piped up from across the sidewalk: “animals eat.” I turned around. Apparently an employee of the store, the man with the accent—Turkish it turns out—had stood watching the sorting and documenting from the doorway to the grocery for quite some time before offering this key intelligence. In broken English, the informant explained to me that the trash had been sorted into real trash (collected by a nightly by a waste hauler), cardboard (collected every other night by a separate recycling hauler) and slops, collected nightly by a private company that drove it to an animal farm in New Jersey. One organizer muttered to another that perhaps this store should be dropped from the tour, seeing as the organic waste they were picking through might not truly be “trash”.

After about an hour of rummaging and a brief display of yam juggling, the woman pictured above stood before an impressive display of produce, bread and half a salami and spoke on a melange of topics including excess waste, fossil fuels, war, labor abuses and rain forest cutting in Central America.

Next, it was on to bagels. I accepted a nearly-whole, perfectly good looking carrot from one of the bins (that by now may be on its way to feed Jersey pigs), peeked into a bag full of bagels from the shop next door and, plucking a pumpernickel for the road, thanked the organizers and headed on my way.

As I walked past the Turkish grocery man again, he asked “going home?”

“Yes,” I said, “thanks again for the information.” He had given me the name of the food waste collection company used by the store. “Wait, I get you sample,” he said. In chatting about garbage collection, we had established the Middle Eastern connection. When I said my family was from Iran, his eyes lit up. He had seemed grateful for a familiar term of reference after watching middle class whites root through would-be-pig-slops for so long. Now, he slipped into the store and returned with a lush container of fresh fruit cup (complete with papaya!), a plastic fork and a plastic bag to carry it in.

“For my neighbor,” he said. I thanked him profusely, considered refusing the bag, but in the end tucked the whole collection into my tote along with my partial carrot and stale black bagel, all to be sampled pre-dawn before another long day of fasting and meditating on food and waste.

Guilty Political Fashion

  I discovered the small company of Monsoon Vermont via a recent comment made by one of the founders on an old post about rag pickers in India.  I tend to be a bit jaded about trash-to-treasure products and eco-friendly fashion that encourages us to pay more or buy things we don’t really need in the name of green.  That said, I do appreciate the power of talking piece fashion, such as the umbrellas available as part of MonsoonVT’s Scavenger Projet.  Objectively practical and fashionable, these bright and beautiful items also carry a political message.

   The umbrellas and other recycled wares—bags, waste baskets, wallets—are made with discarded packaging collected by scavengers in Indonesia and double as awareness-and-fund-raising tools for the YE Water Program in Jakarta.

Photos via the MonsoonVT site.

The West Bank Boys

From Steven Erlanger’s grim New York Times piece on young Palestinians picking through Israeli settler trash to survive:

The boys are part of a loose-knit colony of scavengers, nearly 250 people who scramble over fetid hills of other people’s trash to eke out a living for their families and themselves. Most are younger than 16; some sleep here during the week to maximize the hours they can hunt for goods to sell. Many are related, from a few large clans, and they have a kind of organization, with a 23-year-old bulldozer driver who settles disputes, and a code of conduct, so that every digger’s finds are respected.

Photo by Rina Castelnuovo via The New York Times

Trash to TiVo

“RECYCLED LIFE”

Thursday, August 16, 2006
7pm –7:45 on CINEMAX

Directed, Photographed and Edited by Leslie Iwerks
Produced by Mike Glad
Narrated by Edward James Olmos
Senior Producer for HBO: Nancy Abraham
Executive Producer for HBO: Sheila Nevins

Zabbaleen

  I’ve been collecting bits and pieces on the Zabbaleen lately, Christian rag pickers in Cairo who got the short end of the governmental stick when Egypt reformed trash laws.  This Christian Science Monitor piece offers some good background.  More to come…

Tijuana Dump

  PRI’s The World aired a long piece on people who live near dumps tonight (thanks for the heads up, Mom).  Stream it from their web site, or check out this complimentary audio slide show on the upcoming documentary Tijuana Dump. 

Photo of a kindergarden near the dump via International Center on Child Labor and Education.

Weekly Compactor

  This week in trash news:

•  A New Yorker pursues a doctorate in ocean trash;
• Protesters in Srinagar win their fight against life in a dumping group;
• Carretoneros in Mexico use trash to haul trash; and
• Toronto officials may require dog owners to compost their pet’s poop.

Recycled Life

  Even though it didn’t win an Oscar, I think you’ll appreciate the short documentary Recycled Life about a toxic dump in Central America and the people who fight for survival nearby.