Cairo’s Garbage City

At the Kirkpatrick Boys blog, an outstanding photo essay on Cairo’s “Garbage City”:

The Zabaleen go all over Cairo and collect household garbage.  They bring it back to this neighborhood and sort it.  Then each separate clan/family is responsible for one type of garbage– one for plastic, one for cardboard, one for fabric etc.  There are workshops everywhere where the garbage is being sorted, taken apart and put back together to make various new things that the family sells to someone.

#Plastic: Trashing our Treasures

I just spent a few days down in the Bahamas — Harbour Island, to be exact. A beautiful spot, but I found myself picking up plastic trash the entire time I was there. Bottles and bottle tops, mostly, but also plastic cutlery, cups, plastic bags, wrapping, and degraded plastic detritus. It was everywhere: alongside the roads, in the bushes, and, most disheartening, along the waterline of one of the world’s most beautiful beaches.

At the airport on Eleuthra today, I spotted a sign imploring people not to “trash our treasures.” But it’s pretty obvious to me that no amount of imploring is going to change the situation. Some people will always litter, and we all drop stuff by accident. One day, I was struggling to keep track of a few small plastic toys that we brought with us to the beach.

On Harbour Island, there’s no recycling, and the trash pickup is limited. Yet even in coastal spots where you do have recycling and lots of trash cans around, plastic litter is a problem. In Delaware last summer, I was stunned by all the junk on the beach – one that had big waste bins set up every 50 yards or so.

It seems to me the answer is better materials, stuff that will biodegrade in a way that won’t wreak environmental havoc. That doesn’t seem like an impossible goal. As a kid, I was never disturbed to find sea glass.