If you’re the sort of person who dutifully checks plastic recycling codes, rinses glass containers before putting them in the appropriate bin and flattens your empty tin cans, you might want to spare a thought for the village of Gedangrowo in East Java, Indonesia.
Gedangrowo’s business is garbage ‒ hectares of garbage ‒ piled up higher than a house. It’s mostly plastic from all around the world – Styrofoam noodle cups from South Korea, dog-food bags from France, phone cards from Germany, deodorant sticks from Australia …
At Gedangrowo, the washed garbage is spread out, dried in the sun then sold as fuel, often to tofu makers. And as it’s burnt, the plastic produces toxins that are absorbed into the tofu, and into the people eating it, and into the chickens being raised nearby. The villagers aren’t complaining: handling waste is easier and more profitable than growing rice. Sometimes, people have even held up rubbish trucks at gunpoint to make sure they receive their fair share of trash.
Why would a nation do this to itself, despite the environmental damage and the fact that Indonesia has cracked down on imports of plastic waste?
Because the paper mills, which are big business in Indonesia, rely heavily on recycling waste paper from other, mostly wealthier, nations. And with that waste comes a lot of plastic, either added deliberately or accidentally, because it isn’t always easy to separate paper from other waste, or because people can’t be bothered throwing their trash in the right bin.
So what sounds like a win for the environment – turning old paper into new paper – results in an environmental catastrophe, in locations far from the places where most of the waste was created.
Indonesia’s trash towns are just one consequence of the multibillion-dollar industry that revolves around buying, selling, shipping and disposing of all the stuff we don’t want any more.
It may not even be described as “waste” – it’s just as likely to be “recyclable materials” or “fuel” – but the damage is the same.
Alexander Clapp, a journalist based in Greece, details the impact of this industry – and often, its sheer weirdness – by journeying to some of the places where making rubbish disappear has become big business. In Turkey, for example, he talks with workers who cut up retired ships, from rusty old freighters to the most luxurious cruise liners.
In theory, this work is carried out in accordance with strict EU regulations; in practice, unsafe conditions often result in untrained workers being killed or maimed, or poisoned by toxic chemicals, which also cause environmental damage.
In Accra, the capital of Ghana, he meets gangs of “burner boys” who play a vital role in the business of tearing apart imported cellphones, computers, televisions, washing machines and other electronic devices.
Their job is simple: take everything that can’t be recycled and burn it to make room for the next wave of cast-off electronics. From the bonfire, the burner boys gather molten copper and leave behind toxins that have made their suburb one of the most polluted places on Earth.
What’s perverse in Ghana’s case is that all these electronic discards aren’t exactly “waste”. Often they’re things that are supposedly still working, given by donors from wealthy countries. But many of the items don’t really work, or not for long, and aren’t worth fixing, so it’s easier and more lucrative to dismantle them, extract any valuable components and, ultimately, incinerate what’s left.
The result, says Clapp, is that residents of rich countries, who are determined to recycle and who genuinely believe they are helping, inflict a toxic legacy upon the many poor Ghanaians who work in the disposal trade.
Clapp doesn’t offer solutions to this problem. Should we just try to do a better job of separating out the stuff that really can be recycled, before sending it overseas? Or should we recycle it properly – but much more expensively – in our own country? Or should we just abandon the pretence and dump most of our waste in the tip?
This is an important book, and a brave one, too, given that people in the waste trade don’t always appreciate investigative journalists or environmentalists poking their noses in.
And if it doesn’t offer answers, maybe it’s because one response to the waste problem is obvious: stop making so much of the stuff.
